Old In Art School

by Nell Irvin Painter

  You could call this my formal aim, purely about how the work looked. Years later, this is still my aim, and its means of attainment remain the same: make lots of work. One of my painting teachers said 85 percent of what artists make is junk. I spent a lot of my time in that 85 percent. Another teacher advised me not to make so many pieces. I should make less and concentrate on making something really good.

  I can’t do that. I can’t only make something really good. All my work, the 85 percent and the 15 percent, comes out of ceaseless experiment. This meant—still means—time in the studio. Ha! That’s easy to say, easier in theory than in praxis. In real life, studio time competes with the need to be present elsewhere, whether at other people’s art openings or for tasks like paying your bills and keeping your house and fending off the torrent of email, not to speak of family and friends. And I have to add that keeping an old body in hand is a full-time job. If I wanted to stay cute, I’d have to spend hours every day in the YMCA.

  The tension between working in the studio and taking care of everything else never ends, complicated always by the need for material support—in plainer words, the need for money. Fortunately for me, this need did not press, supported as I was—as I am—by Glenn, my husband, my patron. This blessing came with a barb to stick in me and into other older women in art who don’t have to worry about money. The combination of gender plus money plus age plays into a stereotype of amateurism, even of inability, as in the impossibility of an old woman with money making good art. This I did not know back then. Or maybe I knew it and rejected the stereotype of a Sunday painter. In any case, and thank heaven for it, at Mason Gross I didn’t apply it to myself.

  My second goal then and there in my second semester at Mason Gross was solemn, even compensatory. I wanted to paint my friends, my intellectual women friends writing thoughtful books about America. They were to be the meaning of my work—its intention. I was thinking like this: American culture largely discounts my friends, mature women scholars in a society barely interested in scholarship. We do important, original work and write books that enrich society’s store of knowledge. Our contributions meet praise in the academic world, but who cares about the academic world? We are not famous or generously remunerated. We dress tastefully in handmade scarves and interesting jewelry. With a tendency toward little jowls, we’re rounded of body, but nothing catastrophic. Good shoes. Manicures. Some of us cover our gray; some straighten our hair. While gun-toting, bootie-wagging entertainment rules American screens, we convey the total opposite of drama. Just compare what’s paid scholars with what’s paid rappers. Of course, professors have longer careers, even longer lives, than most rappers, another reason for invisibility. By the time we have made our major contributions, we’re no longer young, no longer cute. My wanting to paint my friends, old like me, also had to do with age. (And here you may be suppressing the uncharitable whisper, Who in the world would want to look at that?) Art history offers relatively few depictions of old people, and very few of those are women.

  It sounds very naive to me now, but I wanted my painting to celebrate my friends. Now that I know more, I can see how very, very, very naive I was to use that word.

  But back then I thought, I will paint my friends in their tasteful studies, next to their computers, writing books worth reading. I will show them alone in thought and together in groups, groups not segregated by color and not prettified in their age beyond the beauty of intelligence. I will respect their singularity and proclaim their community.

  I was echoing my mother’s hymn to invisible Americans in her book about middle-class black people. Her editor made up the title: The Unsung Heart of Black America. I wanted to paint a sort of Unsung Heart of (Mostly) Black Women Thinkers, to visualize my little-noticed part of the American world.

  WHEN I TOLD Teacher Stephen I wanted to celebrate my friends, he said something I heard as:

  No.

  As I remember it, perhaps more emphatically than his actual words, he said,

  Illustration! You can’t do that.

  The dismissive term “illustration” leads into a welter of concepts such as realism, figuration, beauty, and boredom, with no clear boundaries between them, themes that run separately and that tangle up together in knots impossible to untie. Realistic painting shows you what you are supposed to think is beautiful, as though you could look through the painting and see the thing—a mountain reflected in a lake, a sky at sunset, a naked young woman. This can be a problem in both figure painting and landscape. In either case, the operative concept is beauty, and beauty, of itself, is boringly insufficient. I thought like that even before Mason Gross. Over the years I have used the word “beautiful” as both a sincere compliment and as a sneering dismissal. So many meanings embedded in that word.

  When I say beauty is boring, I agree with my teachers and so many of the artists I know, but not all of them. I part company with a good percentage of the two million Americans who call themselves artists and the millions of collectors who buy their stuff. I met one such artist early in my Mason Gross classes. Soft little Kerry painted pretty horses. I shouldn’t call her “fat.” My good feminist friends have slapped my hand over my use of that word, but my disdain for her painting sees her in just so judgmental a way.

  In crits in our first year, we students, even those who painted cartoon characters or their fellow drunks sleeping it off in dingy basements, knew enough to decry Kerry’s horses prancing through fields into multihued dawns and sunsets. They looked like advertisements for mind-altering drugs. Nothing, absolutely nothing under the sun, could be more hackneyed. Kerry stopped her ears and kept painting her horses in their glamour. More crits followed, more of our complaining we’d seen her images a thousand times and were sick of them. We’d already grown tired of them before Mason Gross. She claimed they were beautiful—they were beautiful in their banality, like the paintings you can buy online as “gallery quality prints” by “independent artists” to make “decor to adore.” She kept painting her horses galloping into the sunset or gazing at the dawn, and we kept telling her they were shit.

  MASON GROSS’S PAINTING studios discouraged another kind of painting that thrives in the Adirondacks where Glenn and I spend summers. The mountains foster realistic painting by the picturesque plein air painters in their floppy hats and artists’ smocks you see every summer setting up their easels and paints beside breathtaking lakes. Their nature scenes are lovely evocations of an imposing landscape, handsome to behold and widely collected in summer cottages called camps. Every year it’s the same beauty. The same pellucid lakes, the same majestic mountains. A juried show in Saranac Lake has been thriving for the past twenty years. Every year eighty artists or more submit mostly paintings but some sculpture, to be shown at the local artists’ guild. These evocations of nature hew to the formula known as “Adirondack,” as in “Adirondack art.” I could even go so far as to damn them as illustrative. Still, I’m more at ease in a room full of boring paintings of beautiful nature than with boring paintings of beautiful people.

  In our society of billion-dollar beauty industries and incessant advertisement, personal beauty is a problem. Beauty is a problem for me in history as well, and not simply on account of race, but race is a hell of a lot of my problem. There’s also the image of class. I can’t repress the distaste too many European aristocrats and churches and castles have stirred up in me over the years. Is it my inner Communist? In Siena, Italy, Glenn and I visited a tiny church museum off the central square. The museum proudly exhibited sumptuous priestly vestments—the cassocks, the stoles, the surplices, the crosses, the miters—and objets d’art collected in the church over the centuries, all costly furnishings of very great beauty. Immensely great beauty. Meanwhile, Italy was driving out its starving poor in search of a living wage. Italians immigrated to Massachusetts and New Jersey and Argentina, where some of them became anarchists and got painted by social realists like Ben Shahn. Their progeny became chiropractors and p
oliticians, winemakers, Jesuits, and the pope. This contrast—this contradiction between priestly sumptuousness and popular want—did not seem right to me. I know my response was more ideological than visual. The objects were gorgeous, products of a society in distress. That was my politics talking. But how to disentangle the visual from the social and economic? Even at my most formalist, I see the social and economic contexts that art comes out of. Formalists may argue for art’s “autonomy,” for its power to transcend the circumstances of its creation and the surroundings where it’s exhibited. This does not work for me, for ideology still plays its part in what counts as good art, in Siena, New York, Miami, and New Jersey. No art detaches from its material world.

  Becoming a painter reinforced my resentment of beauty in the scenarized abundance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a resentment that causes me problems in figurative painting. In the museum, the subjects in those rooms after rooms are rich Europeans—white people—dressed and painted to showcase their wealth. It’s enough to turn you—well, to turn me—into a little artist revolutionary.

  I’m hardly the first to turn self-righteous and dismissive of highly skilled figure painting, beautiful or not, as retrograde. This is even more of an issue in our era of art-school deskilling, when polish alone can damn a work. How many complaints have I heard from conservatives (mostly) that the DIY aesthetic has ruined painting? Painters can no longer draw, they say, they don’t know color, don’t know perspective, and don’t know how to transfer the look of a body to paper or canvas. But when virtuoso finish just replicates tradition, what’s to appeal to a student of painting today? Certainly not the name “figurative.” The problem lies in the label as well as the craft.

  In fact, exciting figurative painting is plentiful right now, some highly resolved, some advertising spontaneity. Only it’s not called “figurative,” a term reserved for boring painting. If the painters who paint people are interesting, their approach gets stressed over their subject matter, so that:

  Dana Schutz’s gestural paintings suffuse history with humor.

  Kerry James Marshall’s scenes of idyllic blackness draw on his Birmingham, Alabama, childhood in conversation with the history of art.

  Peter Doig takes risks in the space between attraction and repulsion.

  Whitfield Lovell’s tableaux explore history and meaning.

  Nicole Eisenman plays with caricature and art history.

  Mickalene Thomas riffs on art history, bringing women of color to the fore.

  Even Willem de Kooning, whose most famous painting, Woman 1, is actually figurative, is classified as a leading Abstract Expressionist, an avatar of the very movement that killed figuration. It’s the chain of associations with figurative painting—realism, skill, beauty—that pushes it to the side nowadays, into the scorned category of “illustration.”

  TEACHER STEPHEN’S OBJECTION, I ultimately figured out, echoed The Art World’s prejudice against “illustration” as opposed to “art.” Illustration to make a point, illustration for pay, illustration as following someone else’s direction—someone with money—illustration as mere design, illustration as hack work, not fine art. In The Art World, illustration is inferior to art on account of serving an end that is not art. Illustration serves subject matter, in my case, my intention to depict my friends. Illustration belongs to the verbal world of meaning, serving verbal meaning’s purpose, whereas painting comes from the “context of art.”

  The context of art?

  “The context of art” confused me. It was not Arthur Danto’s “context of art” when he called Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes art, not where art was shown and bought and sold. Was this “context of art” art history, the subject I was studying in Voorhees Hall on the College Avenue campus among hundreds of other undergraduates scrutinizing images from a textbook running to several volumes and no black artists after the ancient Egyptians? Was this “context of art” in the contemporary art world that I was seeing in museums and galleries, art so heavily inclined toward white men, as though white men floated freely above definitions—limitations—related to sex and race? Was this “context of art” to be found in biographies of important contemporary artists, where women are still a minority and black artists are still feeling their way? Did something in the work of women and black artists set it outside the “context of art”? How did these questions affect my work? Where was my place within the larger context of art? Did I, could I, find a place within it?

  For the longest time, most art by female and black artists got ignored completely. Everyone will admit to this by now, even the staunchest upholders of the theory that truly great art gets its due no matter who makes it. But maybe more was in play than straightforward, unadulterated discrimination on account of sex and race.

  I’m not condoning discrimination here or pretending it did not, does not exist. I’m trying to understand The Art World’s unique means of getting notice through the widely accepted distinction between art and illustration. Part of ignoring black and feminist art came out of its widespread dismissal as mere illustration, as mere propaganda. It was as though the work of Faith Ringgold and Alice Neel, for instance, lost its value as art on account of carrying strong messages against racial injustice or in solidarity with women and workers. This, beside the prevailing—and continuing—assumption that white-male work is raceless and genderless and innocent of ideological content. Which it isn’t.

  Of course, much of the prejudice against black and women artists such as I was on my way to becoming was merely because they—we—were and are black artists in a racist culture and female artists in a sexist world. But there’s more. Art history’s lacunae were showing me that non-black artists who are male also fell by the wayside, thrown over as illustrators. I’ve mentioned the case of Ben Shahn, beloved in the 1940s, forgotten a generation later in the 1960s. Abstract Expressionism also buried Thomas Hart Benton’s American Scene painting. Benton, another leftist, depicted a rural world of honest, hardworking white people besieged by the forces of industry. In the 1930s and 1940s Benton was a Great Artist whose work adorned public spaces. By the 1960s he was as gone from art history as soon would be Ben Shahn.

  Was Benton on Stephen’s mind when he bridled at my plan? Perhaps. As a teacher of undergraduate painters he had surely endured too many encomiastic paintings of stupendously empowered goddesses and perfectly gorgeous black families. This kind of painting is figurative or realistic or beautiful, and idealized. Patronized within The Art World, it’s beloved in the wider world.

  Here’s an example. The Studio Museum in Harlem gave in to popular demand in 2002 and featured positive-image work in its show Black Romantic: The Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African-American Art. And popular demand certainly exists. Idealized, illustrative work by black artists far outweighs and far outsells the black art recognized in The Art World as contemporary art. Black romantic art evokes praise from people who avoid Kara Walker.

  No question but that black romantic works’ positive images are as pleasing and positive as the white world depicted in work by Norman Rockwell and the Wyeths, all of it long dismissed as illustration. Rockwell and the Wyeths comfort viewers looking for a nicer American world, but artists of the black romantic have an even stronger mission. In a society still propagating stereotype, their work assails negativity. These images contest stereotype and fill a psychic need. Black romantic artists are widely popular among non-Art-World audiences, and they are better known than the few black and female artists I was learning about in art school. Teacher Stephen was probably steering me away from feel-good, positive-image art. I still ask questions, though: Is positive-image art mere illustration? Does it emerge from a or from the context of art?

  The illustration versus context of art conflict is easily resolved when you look at art that is so much message that you lose the image, or where the image doesn’t hold the eye. But it’s hard to draw the line. What counts as art has changed as tastes have changed. Mess
age art sometimes breaks into The Art World as “conceptual art,” art that transmits ideas first and foremost, as in the work of highly regarded artists like Lawrence Weiner and Glenn Ligon (all text, no image) and Barbara Kruger (mostly text, some image).

  Conceptual art starts and ends with idea, often expressed in the virtual absence of art made by hand by the artist. In recent decades, what used to be dismissed as propaganda—Soviet socialist realism, Black Panther posters—can be exhibited as fine art, now that their messages have lost their bite. The Obamas have displayed Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With in the White House, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, has mounted a major exhibition of Rockwell’s work organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts. (If you want your work to be seen after you die, make sure surviving family members build a museum in your name. The Norman Rockwell Museum [not Crystal Bridges] owns The Problem We All Live With.)

  I was studying art at a time when changing tastes meant Art World recognition for artists whose work conveyed clear progressive meaning. Feminist artists like Joyce Kozloff (who began in the outspokenly feminist Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s), Judy Chicago (one of the founders of Womanhouse in Los Angeles in the 1970s), and Nancy Spero (who expressed feminism through ancient imagery) were ignored for decades before breaking into what must surely be the context of art. Similarly, black artists, even those who, like Jacob Lawrence, have stated their intent to depict the unknown beauty of their people, now belong to art history. Barkley L. Hendricks’s vivid, life-size portraits spent decades exiled from the art history I was studying in Voorhees Hall. Hendricks was painting up a storm in the 1960s and 1970s, producing visually arresting images of his self-confident friends, neighbors, and undressed self, all of whom were black. But he didn’t have a retrospective until 2008. Only then could his work be seen as part of American realism and postmodernism, right up there with the long and loudly applauded work of Alex Katz.