Speaker 1 (00:00): Coming up on Art Palace. Speaker 2 (00:02): So even the show is called American Painting the eighties. All of the paintings with the exception of one, are from the 1970s. Speaker 1 (00:23): Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell eig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool person is Kate Bonn Zinga, director of the School of Art, college of Design, architecture, art and Planning at the University of Cincinnati and guest curator of our special exhibition, American Painting, the eighties Revisited. So tell me a little bit about how this exhibition came to be and how you got involved with it. Speaker 2 (00:59): So it was really thrilling for me, actually. I got a call from Cynthia Amne out of the blue. It was in February of 2020, so right before Covid. And she told me a little bit about this exhibition and asked me if I might be able to make time and have the interest in guests curating it. And I leapt at the opportunity. And then within a month she called me back and said, we're putting a hold on. This Speaker 1 (01:28): Covid Speaker 2 (01:28): Had settled in the museum was soon to close to the public. So she said, we'll call you back when we're ready to reignite the plans if and when that happens. Called me again in November and said, now we were waiting, waiting, waiting, but now we really want to hurry up and rush because we want to open this thing around March. Speaker 1 (01:47): Yes. Speaker 2 (01:48): Are you still interested? And I said, yes. Speaker 1 (01:50): Awesome. Speaker 2 (01:51): So how, and I think that Cynthia thought of me just because I'm a 21st century specialist, really contemporary art is my area of expertise. That's what most of my background is in. And she thought it would sort of fill this void on the curatorial staff at the museum. There was no one really that was leaping at the opportunity to guess curate this. Julie was completely overwhelmed and booked with the VEX exhibition. And so they just didn't have the staff power to really take it on. So that's why I think she called me. Speaker 1 (02:27): And all of these works were collected by the same person or the same people, correct. Right. Speaker 2 (02:32): So that's the interesting story. This exhibition was actually curated originally by a woman named Barbara Rose. She was an art historian, critic curator who resided in New York City in the set 1970s. This show was on view at the Gray Art Gallery in 1979 at New York University. John and Ronnie Shore, who are Cincinnati based collectors, saw exhibition at the Gray and ended up buying the whole thing in 1984. And it's been on view over the decades in their various residences in Florida, Cincinnati, and New York City. And in 2018, they gave the whole thing to the Cincinnati Art Museum. So the original exhibition curated by Barbara Rose was 41 paintings. What you see here is 40 paintings and one drawing because the drawing that this painting replaces, I'm sorry, the painting that this drawing replaces was gifted to MoMA Museum of Modern Art in New York City. So I kind of need to digress here for a second. After this show closed in New York City in October of 1979, it traveled to Houston Tel Aviv, several cities in Europe, and the person responsible for traveling, it was a guy named Paul Ham who was a dealer. He had purchased the entire exhibition from the artists. Each of the individual artists Speaker 2 (04:05): Toured the exhibition. When it came back in 1982, he was storing it. And then John Shor called him in 84, said, I'd like to buy the whole thing. Hayne was motivated to sell because he'd been storing the whole thing. And then it came to the shores between 1982 when the exhibition tour ended in Europe. And 1984, when Ham sold it to the shores, he had sold the Susan Rothenberg painting of the horse that was in the exhibition to another collector Speaker 1 (04:35): Named Speaker 2 (04:35): Edward Breda. And Breda in turn donated it to MoMA so black in place that you see an image of here on the wall label that is in the MoMA collection. In the meantime, sometime between 84 and today, the shores bought this drawing to replace sort of honor Susan Rothenberg's role in this exhibition. So this is the only drawing in this exhibition. It's also the only piece that is not part of the permanent collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum because the shores still own this and lent it to the museum for this exhibition. Speaker 1 (05:11): So you said we're standing in the smaller gallery, right? The Speaker 2 (05:14): Smaller of two Speaker 1 (05:15): Of spaces on the third Speaker 2 (05:17): Floor. Speaker 1 (05:18): And you said this is sort of how you imagine most people would start probably because coming in from the elevator, if you're want to save your knees, take the elevator, so the stairs. And so why do you think this selection of paintings is a good starting point? Speaker 2 (05:35): Well, first we have the sort of explanatory wall text, Speaker 1 (05:38): Which Speaker 2 (05:39): Goes into the story that I just shared with Speaker 1 (05:41): You Speaker 2 (05:41): About Barbara Rose. And the other important point that's iterated in that text that I wanted to share with you before we start about the individual works is that in New York City in 1979, painting was dead. So the avant-garde was interested in sculpture performance. Video painting was sort of this antique medium that progressive artists supposedly were no longer interested in. So Barbara Rose, the curator, resisted that and said, no, there's really innovative painting that's happening right here, right now, and that's what I want to exhibit at New York University. So through studio visits, individual studio visits with the artists, she made her selection of works. And as you see in this gallery, and we'll see throughout the exhibition, she had a preference for abstraction. Speaker 2 (06:40): And so this very first painting that you see on your right as you exit the elevator is by an artist named Mark Schlesinger who, and also all of the artists except for one, lived in New York City in 1979, Schlesinger was one of the 40 that lived in New York City. The one who didn't is Sam Gilliam, who was in DC and still lives in dc. This to me kind of evokes pattern and decoration and pointilism that we think of with 19th century art, but just really detailed marks on canvas, swirls of color, kind of to me reminiscent of quilt making, maybe sort of more of a feminine approach to art making in my opinion. And really the way we designed the exhibition. So that paintings that you could see from a single vantage point in 1979, you can see from a single vantage point in 2021. Speaker 3 (07:42): Okay. Speaker 2 (07:42): So that's what Lauren Walker did a really brilliant job of. It's the exhibition designer. I had some archival photographs from the gray that I shared with her and said, if there's any way you can recreate those relationships, I think that would really be an ideal way of conceptualizing how to place the paintings. Speaker 2 (08:00): So in 79 Schlesinger and Moscowitz, which you see it's left, we're near each other as was Elizabeth Murray that you see here in the vista as you get off the elevator. The other reason we wanted the Elizabeth Murray piece to be really the first one you see as you're standing in the elevator is because she's one of the artists who really came to international acclaim between the time that this was exhibited in 79 and the time of her death. And this painting is an important piece because it's one of the first that she painted that's not a rectangle. So she became really interested in alternatives to the rectangular canvas. Eventually she actually fractured her canvases. So there are multiple pieces or components to a single artwork. But this one you can see she just sort of tilted on its edge and uses her typical bright color palette, which is I associate with her roots in Chicago and the Chicago images as much as I associate with New York abstraction of the late 1970s. But she really went on to be acclaimed as one of the most important artists of the 1990s in the United States. Speaker 1 (09:26): Probably the biggest name that popped out to me definitely while just walking around the room was Elizabeth Murray. Speaker 2 (09:33): And Speaker 1 (09:33): I think it is a great piece to see when you open up the elevator because it does kind of upend your notions of painting right off the bat. Okay. It's tilted, it's not quite a rectangle. And the way that the shapes play with the edges Speaker 2 (09:51): Of the Speaker 1 (09:51): Painting are also really kind of messing with it in the way that the picture ness of it and its objectness, I guess Speaker 2 (10:02): Great way to put it. And the colors too, just like the purple and red and expansive green, it's really what we might call a lipstick palette. Speaker 1 (10:12): And these two are also such great little yin and yang here of the moskowitz and the Schlesinger Speaker 2 (10:21): Of Speaker 1 (10:22): Overload. And then this place to kind of take a breath in that sea of red. Speaker 2 (10:28): And it does look like a sea of ray, and unless you look really closely, you can barely see that silhouette of a windmill. Speaker 1 (10:34): Yeah, I noticed it more when we were walking back into the room. I think the light was hitting it from an angle. It was like, oh, there's a big old windmill on. It takes Speaker 2 (10:42): A minute. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 (10:45): Well, let's move on and go into the the main gallery. And we also have another piece here at the top of the stairs too. So Speaker 2 (10:52): In this transitional gallery, we have another really important artwork by Sam Gillian, who is coincidentally and is sometimes criticized for not addressing issues of recent identity in his artwork. But since he began making art in the early 1960s up until today, he has remained steadfastly a formalist and is very proud of and committed to that. So what you see here is a collage of canvases that he painted cut up and then collage back on top of each other. And one of the things I like most about this painting is its attention to detail. So you can see that it wraps around the edge of the stretcher. So if you peer around it side, it looks like the painting continues into the wall behind it. And its beveled edges are also really, really gorgeous. Speaker 1 (11:48): And people who know the cam collection might recognize the name from his piece that that was on display for many years called Arch. That's just a sort of hanging fabric piece that's stained Speaker 2 (12:03): And that's actually on view right now in the gallery below us. Yes, I'm Speaker 1 (12:06): Glad this because it's been so long since I've been here. Speaker 2 (12:10): And those types of works are the ones that he became best known for are the stained drape canvases because they really play with architectural space and are part painting, part sculpture. But he also did these collages throughout his career that he's less known for but are equally that are equally magnificent in my opinion. But it is a treat for cam visitors to be able to see both types of paintings that he's rented in a single visit today. Speaker 1 (12:36): Yeah, I definitely, I would never have guessed this was his. And when you said Sam Gilliam was in the show earlier, I kind of thought where, Speaker 2 (12:45): Because I was Speaker 1 (12:46): Expecting one of those draped pieces. Speaker 2 (12:50): Well, he had started doing therape pieces in the mid seventies, so at the time that he made this one, he was already doing those. But he's, throughout his career, done many different types of work, all of it, formal, all of it, really pushing the properties of paint. And this is just an example of how he was doing the draped as well as the collages at the same time. Speaker 1 (13:09): Yeah, I mean they do feel like opposite ends of a spectrum Speaker 2 (13:14): In a Speaker 1 (13:15): Way, because this one is so built up in this caustic paint. And then it also, the structure of it feels extra rigid in the way that it feels very solid. And so compared to those pieces, which are a breeze could change their structure and the paint is just staining the surface. You're always very aware of the canvases and material. They're so different. Speaker 2 (13:45): Yeah, I agree. But both of them are really pushing the boundaries of what a painting can be. I think that's what they have in common. Yeah, Speaker 1 (13:53): Definitely. Speaker 2 (13:55): I think you'll find that throughout the show is that all of the artists are pushing the material qualities of paint Speaker 1 (14:03): Beyond Speaker 2 (14:03): What they might've done prior to the time that these artists did that. Speaker 1 (14:07): Well, you said there's a ton of painting, so I know we're not going to probably have a chance to talk about each Speaker 2 (14:12): And Speaker 1 (14:12): Every one of them because we have, was it 41 Speaker 2 (14:15): Or there's 41 works, including the drawing? The drawing, yeah. So there's 40 paintings. I will say all of them for our listeners are large scale abstract canvases. One of the first ones you see when you walk into the third gallery, which is the biggest gallery of the exhibition, is a piece called Troia by Nancy Graves, who was another one of the better known artists in the exhibition. Speaker 2 (14:41): And she has many reasons why she was important. One of them is that she was in 1969, I think it was. She graduated from Yale. Oh, this is another undercurrent Russell, is that most of these artists are educated, most of them earned their master's of fine arts. There are a few exceptions, but she is one of them amongst the majority in the show that are educated with master's degrees in fine arts. She earned hers from Yale in 1964 and five years after that, she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was the youngest artist to earn that recognition and only the fifth woman to have earned a solo exhibition at the Whitney at that time. So she was launched quite early Speaker 2 (15:30): To earn some recognition. In the early seventies, she was sculpting, sculpting, sort of mixed media abstractions that referenced animals. So in the late seventies, she returns to painting, which she had been doing as a graduate student at Yale. And this is an example of her return to painting. And you can see again, Elizabeth Murray Graves is using really bright colors. Graves is sort of edge to edge of the canvas, highly charged gestures, which is where I think she got the title Troia, which is not a word in English, but if you think of stroboscope, it's a light that generates bursts of bright light and it also has a lot of movement. So it's about corporeal movement and bursts of light all in one painting. And she used NASA images. She became well known for really researching her images. So whereas a lot of these artists were about self-expression or sort of internal thoughts, internal feelings, internal anxieties and expressing 'em on canvas graves was really about the exterior world and researching her subjects and then translating them into abstract forms. And in that sense, she was really prescient because many artists today are research oriented, so she deserves credit for that as well. Speaker 1 (16:52): Yeah, I know this is another artist that we have in the collection as well, Speaker 2 (16:56): And Speaker 1 (16:57): That other painting, you can sort of see when you look what looks just to be totally abstract at first, you can start to see these shapes of fish and things swimming around in this sea of color and lines. So yeah, it's like these little shapes in this one that I don't know exactly what they are, but they feel almost like cellular or something. And maybe it's just the sort of covid environment Speaker 2 (17:23): That we've become accustomed to. Yeah, definitely. Speaker 1 (17:25): We see everything in that way, maybe now, but there's something that does feel almost biological about that shape, and it feels really specific. It doesn't feel just made up. It doesn't feel arbitrary in the way that maybe some of the other mark making you feel like, oh, that's just sort of expressive line making, whereas those feel like, no, that's supposed to be something, even if it's sort of taken out of its original environment and now it can't exactly place what it is or what it's supposed to be like. You kind of mentioned NASA images, Speaker 2 (17:57): So Speaker 1 (17:58): Yeah, it could be Speaker 2 (17:58): Satellite images, Speaker 1 (18:00): It could be something geological or something. It could be like a mountain range from above. It could be so many things, but here it's just sort of acting in a purely formal way almost. Speaker 2 (18:13): And that's the image that you'll see when you're driving up to the museum. It's featured in the signage at the foot of the driveway. Speaker 1 (18:21): Right. Yeah. Well, it's super colorful like you mentioned. So I think it is definitely an eye-catching one that I'm sure that a lot of people will enjoy right away. It is just sort of this kaleidoscopic view. Speaker 2 (18:35): Okay, so you want to pick another one? Speaker 1 (18:39): Let's talk about, I don't know anything about this one by Elaine Cohen. Speaker 2 (18:46): Yeah, it's, as you can see, is one of the harder edge paintings in the exhibition. So it's really clean lines, lots of rectangles, a palette of black, blue, red, and sort of a moy beige, little bit of orange in there. And she was actually a graphic designer. She recently passed away in 2016 and with her husband became really well known for environmental graphics. So she created a signage motif and campaign for many of the modernist architects for their buildings architects like Philip Johnson and Aero Sein, but she also painted throughout her career and really saw the paintings as an outlet for her own individual private vision and form of expression. But you can definitely see the graphic design training in this painting. Speaker 1 (19:40): Yeah, I mean, I chose it specifically. It seems about as opposite of the last painting. So I was like, let's go to that one. That could not be a more opposite approach, which is kind of cool to see. I think in a way you can think like, oh, eighties paintings, I know what that looks like. But really, I mean this is a good example of actually, there's still so much variety even when we're talking about paintings from the eighties that are totally abstract. Right, Speaker 2 (20:04): Right. Well, that's absolutely true. You see so many different styles. And just based on what you said, I wanted to point out that all of the paintings, with the exception of one, are from the 1970s. Speaker 1 (20:17): So Speaker 2 (20:17): Even the show is called American Painting, the eighties, the paintings are from the seventies, many from 1979, the year that the exhibition was first on view at the Gray Art Gallery. So critics, there was a lot of media about this show Speaker 2 (20:32): In part, I think because Barbara Rose was so well known, but the critics really took issue with the title. They said, how can you predetermine a decade before the decade happens? So that was one of the things they hated. The other thing that I take issue with though none of them said anything about this is that she called it American painting. And actually it was New York City painting because all the artists were living in New York City except for Sam Gilliam. So there's really two misnomers in the title, and we decided to title this exhibition for 2021 American Painting, the eighties Revisited because we're revisiting her ideas from that time, Barbara Rose's ideas. I really credit her for being very courageous. She was so confident that this painting was the wave of the future. That abstract painting was a way of the future that she titled her exhibition after the decade that succeeded it rather than the one that it actually took place in. Speaker 1 (21:32): I feel like people are always declaring painting dead though, Speaker 2 (21:35): And Speaker 1 (21:35): Then it's like it never really does Well. That's right. It's just a constantly like, oh, it's dead again. Oh no, it's not. It's never dead. It's never dead. It's always around. Speaker 2 (21:42): And I think that's something visitors could keep in mind. Was Barbara Rose's courage in curating this exhibition and New York University's courage and showing the work, even though painting was in disfavor at the time, could that have maybe made a difference in painter's commitment to painting? Is that something that they said, oh, well, if Barbara Rose thinks this is the wave of the future and New York University thinks it is as well, I feel confident in continuing Speaker 1 (22:13): Or Speaker 2 (22:13): Maybe I'll shift from sculpture to painting because these important people think it's okay to do that. Speaker 1 (22:19): The other thing too about this, these works being from the late seventies instead of the eighties, something that came up in another episode when I was talking with one of our curatorial assistants who's now a curator in Kansas City, is he kind of brought up the idea that really a lot of times we break things down by decade, but post-war, a lot of things really, if you start at 45 and move in 10 years after that, there's actually a lot, sometimes more similarities between say 45 to 55, 55 to 65, 65 to 75, 75 to 85. And the more I think about it, the more I'm always like, yeah, that is kind of true. I mean, there's two, when you think about the sixties, I feel like the beginning of the sixties and the end of the sixties Speaker 2 (23:01): Totally different. Speaker 1 (23:01): Nothing alike. Yeah, Speaker 2 (23:03): Absolutely. Speaker 1 (23:03): Whereas a lot of times, I think the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties look a lot alike. So I don't know if we're still in that phase anymore, Speaker 2 (23:14): But Speaker 1 (23:15): Where things kind of move in that way. But I feel like this work fits into that where it's like, yeah, it's into the seventies and beginning of the eighties, they're, these are all arbitrary lines. Anyway, it doesn't really matter, but we can go around the corner, keep moving. We should say this space. I don't know if we talked a little bit about the exhibition design, but it's so strange to be on the third floor now with these walls here because we used to have this sort of just hole in the middle of the gallery, but we've built extra walls to accommodate all of these paintings. So it just feels totally transformed. It's just fascinating to be walking around this space in a totally different way. Speaker 2 (23:54): And that's something I wanted to point out to the visitors is that when you walk into the third gallery, which we're in right now, the walls are probably, what would you say, Russell 12 feet high about? I think they're 12 foot high walls. Speaker 1 (24:06): Yeah, they're probably 12 feet, right, thereabouts. Speaker 2 (24:09): And we constructed those to create enough wall space to hang all 41 works of art. The paintings are very tightly hung in the sense that they're close together, which is another thing that we replicated from New York University's format. So there's a lot of energy in the gallery, energy sort of between the paintings, the way they're interacting with one another visually. And I think each painting is in and of itself a really powerful statement, but then taken as a collection even more magnificent. So that's something to keep in mind that the way we hung them, not only in their proximity to one another, but also in which one we hung next to the next was really an attempt to our best ability replicate the feeling that was evoked in New York in 1979. Speaker 1 (25:02): I mean, there's a lot of really great little conversations happening between these paintings. We're standing looking at this painting by Thornton Will is called Blue Soldier, which is mostly blue and yellow, and then we see the same blue and yellow next to it in this painting by Louisa Chase called Ocean, even though they're very different in their approaches. But you have that little bit of a relationship between the palette, which is great. And then it's fun because the next painting here, which is called Ghost Rider by Stuart Hitch, has the sort of similar shapes and these kind of explosions that you see in the Louisa Chase, but a very different palette. So it's this great little, it's like a game of telephone or something. Yeah, that's so true. Speaker 2 (25:47): Yeah, Speaker 1 (25:48): It's really cool. And then I feel like that palette continues over here into the next one, and so I can totally understand the logic of all of Speaker 2 (25:55): How we decided. Speaker 1 (25:55): Yeah, yeah, it looks great. Ghost writer, that's such an unusual painting. Speaker 2 (26:02): Yeah, Speaker 1 (26:02): I love it. And Speaker 2 (26:03): He became well known for that type of work. This sort of one critic called it, they looked like corporate logos. He sort of starburst patterns singular image on a diametrically different colored background. Speaker 1 (26:18): But then it's too clumsy for that Speaker 2 (26:20): Too. Speaker 1 (26:21): And the thing I noticed about it immediately is that little edge of yellow that's poking through. Speaker 2 (26:27): So Speaker 1 (26:27): It's like you painted it, probably painted it yellow, first painted the black and then painted the red over top of it, but left those little traces peeking through. And that's like what gives it this strange, Speaker 2 (26:40): It's a painting and not something else because of those. Yeah. Speaker 1 (26:44): It also gives that, it makes the sort of dark black blue in the middle feel more like an actual void. There's actually something weirdly three dimensional about it. I can almost read that yellow as the edge of a cut. So it's weird not, I mean, there's nothing about it that would make you feel like, oh, it's some Trump Lo painting or Speaker 2 (27:06): Something. Speaker 1 (27:07): But it does play with that. To me at least that sense of space and void or something that is a little surprising. Speaker 2 (27:16): And this one by Joan Thorn is probably the most tactile of Speaker 1 (27:19): All the Speaker 2 (27:20): Paintings. There are many tactile paintings, but just the lusciousness and the thickness of the paint is really exciting to see. Speaker 1 (27:27): It almost looks like Speaker 2 (27:28): Icing, doesn't it? On a Speaker 1 (27:29): Cake? It does. I was just about to say this is they should have a guard posted here all day. Speaker 2 (27:34): No licking Speaker 1 (27:37): People going to want to touch those Speaker 2 (27:38): Lines. Speaker 1 (27:42): That palette, there is something about this, these color choices, which do again, even though this is from 1979, to me, if I was to be make something where you were like, come up with an eighties palette, this would be it. So I think in that way, they were right about predicting what was coming. I mean, I feel like this is the palette that I associate with the eighties, at least a lot of the eighties, maybe more when this was sort of co-opted by sort of more commercial things. And you can totally see how this stock Speaker 2 (28:16): Pink and green and avocado green and sort of turquoise blue as well as royal blue. Speaker 1 (28:23): Yeah. Actually, in some ways, I think if I were to just guess a time period based on the popularity of these colors, I would definitely put it much later probably because I think of those colors as probably later eighties. So I think it was ahead of pop culture in that way at least, because probably if you think of what was going on in people's houses and things in 1979, it's probably a lot of, I don't know, avocado and Speaker 2 (28:52): Harvest Speaker 1 (28:52): Gold. Speaker 2 (28:53): That's right. Speaker 1 (28:54): That's what my parents catching. And Speaker 2 (28:55): Remember, Jimmy Carter was president at the time in the United States that shifted in 1980, Ronald Reagan became president. Right. So Jimmy Carter was in the White House in his cardigan sweaters when this show took place, oil crisis was happening, all of that. Speaker 1 (29:12): This is another painting. Have we used this also in ads? Speaker 2 (29:15): That's on the banner Speaker 1 (29:17): On Speaker 2 (29:17): The staircase as you enter the exterior staircase as you enter the museum. And this is the painting I was telling you about, which is the only painting from the 1980s. Speaker 1 (29:27): Okay. This is Dennis Ash Ball's untitled Speaker 2 (29:30): From 1983, and the reason it's from 1983 is that when the exhibition toured to Europe, which I explained earlier, the final venue, which was the GoldBean Foundation and Lisbon, Portugal purchased five of the paintings. One of the paintings they purchased was by Dennis Ashbaugh, and this is the replacement ostensibly selected by Barbara Rose to the collection by Ashbaugh. So then there were four other artists whose paintings were collected by the GoldBean, and she picked a piece by each of those artists to replace for the exhibition as well. Speaker 1 (30:04): Yeah. This one is, I mean, again, compared just to kind of keep harping on variety, it's so much more muted compared to a lot of the things around it. It uses the white and sort of all these different shades of white and ivory. And are there areas of blank canvas poking through or is it just sort of painting to look like a blank canvas? Speaker 2 (30:27): I think it's all painted, but you're right. The color is similar to what a white Speaker 1 (30:33): Canvas would look. I think you're right. I think it's on, it's actually looks like, I think actually the areas of canvas that you can see through are here on the edge are like that darker canvas. I can see it on this side. And it's actually not the sort of typical color canvas we imagine. It's that darker canvas. Speaker 2 (30:51): You can see a little bit of it through here, Russell, but not much of it. Most of it's painted. Speaker 1 (30:55): Yeah. So the color I was reading is canvas is actually is all paint, Speaker 2 (31:00): And you can see in the wall label what the original piece looked like that the GoldBean Foundation collected. So we have that on each of the wall labels for the pieces that were replaced. You'll see the original painting on the label. I want to just point out this piece because it was created by a painter who was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. Speaker 1 (31:20): Oh, really? Speaker 2 (31:20): Yeah, his name is Edward. And then resided in New York City. And he was an apprentice to Helen Frankenthaler, who was a well-known painter and created this beautiful canvas that I really think of as combining the rigor of geometry, because a lot of the forms are geometric as far as the squares and what look like the arcs that you might make with the compass, but then it's very gestural as Speaker 1 (31:46): Well. Speaker 2 (31:47): So I love that about it. It's juxtaposition of those two things. And he, as far as I know, never made a living as a painter. So he was working at bars and clubs while he was Helen Franken's apprentice, trying to make a go of it as a painter. And he ended up opening his own restaurant on West Broadway in Manhattan, Speaker 1 (32:08): And Speaker 2 (32:08): It's called Edwards and it's still there. So if you're ever in Manhattan, want to check out this restaurant made, created by this really creative person who was trained as a painter, it's there for you to check out. Coincidentally on, I think it's the third Monday of every month, he serves Cincinnati specials there Speaker 1 (32:28): Like Speaker 2 (32:28): Osis and Montgomery ribs and that kind of thing. Speaker 1 (32:33): I love this pencil line down the middle Speaker 2 (32:35): Of it. Speaker 1 (32:35): That's great fitness of that. It Speaker 2 (32:38): Shows some of, too, I think some of his thinking process. Speaker 1 (32:42): This one I feel like I've seen before, but I'm not sure if I am just Speaker 2 (32:46): Crazy. So this is one of the few artists in the show who's untrained, and I should say he passed away in 2017, Leonard Contino, and he started his painting career as a pins striper on cars in Brooklyn when he was a teenager. And he suffered quadriplegia due to a diving accident and was in rehabilitation at the Rusk Institute at New York University Speaker 1 (33:13): And Speaker 2 (33:13): Met Mark de Suvero, Speaker 1 (33:15): Another Speaker 2 (33:15): Artist who was in rehabilitation there, physical rehabilitation. Speaker 1 (33:19): People would know that name. Probably just from the giant red sculpture outside of our building when you pull up and from many other giant red sculptures you see outside of many other art museums across the country. Speaker 2 (33:33): Right. So SRO encouraged him to become an artist, and Canino did, and this is a painting, one of the paintings he produced with a brace strapped to his arm, and typically Hard Edge became well-known for that, widely collected. He's part of many prestigious museum collections. But yeah, this is just black lines on white campus. Speaker 1 (33:56): Again, lots Speaker 2 (33:57): Of triangles. They come together at a vantage point at the very top edge of the painting. Speaker 1 (34:01): And I mean, it's really actually one of the few paintings. There's actually kind of another one, again, across from it kind of talking to it, but it's one of the few pieces without any color Speaker 2 (34:11): Really Speaker 1 (34:12): In the exhibition. Actually, I said this piece across from it, it has no color, but now that I'm looking at it, there's these really thin blue lines Speaker 2 (34:18): Kind of Yeah, that's right through the brown. Yeah. Speaker 1 (34:20): Tracing kind of Speaker 2 (34:22): Again, these pencil lines on the unprimed canvas that give you insights to the process and how he figured out where to place each shape. Speaker 1 (34:30): And this one is a lot more interesting. I think the closer you examine it as well. I think from afar, I didn't notice that texture Speaker 2 (34:39): And Speaker 1 (34:39): The way it's kind that gritty matte again, it's not quite as delicious as painting over there that we think people might lick, but it has a little bit of that cake frosting kind Speaker 2 (34:55): Feeling Speaker 1 (34:55): To it as well. When I turned the corner, this gold piece, it just immediate. Speaker 2 (35:01): It's amazing, isn't it? Speaker 1 (35:02): Yeah. It just really, it kind of shocked me. I just was not expecting to see, because Speaker 2 (35:07): If it's sort of heft and it's got clay in it, that's what gives it that sort Speaker 1 (35:12): Of Speaker 2 (35:13): Earthy built up look. And then it's gold leafed on top of those layers of clay, and he made these sort of slashes, one that looks like an X through that clay. But Murray's piece is sort of a tilted rectangle, which sort of throws you off kilter, but it does, it looks like drying earth or the desert painting gold, doesn't it? Speaker 1 (35:36): And I was going to try to attempt to say this artist's names and title, but this one is a real mouthful. Speaker 2 (35:41): It is Carl Speaker 1 (35:45): And X i, INTA Speaker 2 (35:49): Is Speaker 1 (35:49): The title. So that lean to it was immediately kind of Speaker 2 (35:55): Disarming, isn't it? Speaker 1 (35:56): Yeah. Yeah, it's great. This one that's kind of right next door to it by William Conlin called Kinder Hook Creek. It really plays with my mind. I stared at it for quite a while just trying to figure out if the canvas was actually straight or not in the way that the Elizabeth Murray and this one we just looked at are not a square or not a rectangle. This one I thought for sure was not, and I'm pretty sure it is. Speaker 2 (36:26): Yeah, I think it is too. Yeah. Speaker 1 (36:29): It's just pulling some real optical effects on Speaker 2 (36:32): You Speaker 1 (36:33): With these lines on the edge that are kind of bending in and these arcs that just warp your sense of space. And it has that super matte quality too, that Speaker 2 (36:45): Just, yeah, it's beautiful, isn't it? Yeah. It kind of reminds me of the Elaine listed Cohen that we were talking about earlier. There's a graphic quality to it and the colors and the way the lines are placed. This is another beauty over here by Ron Gorbachev that looks, the shape of the canvas is completely unexpected. It looks like a saddle on a horse. Speaker 1 (37:07): Yeah. Speaker 2 (37:07): Doesn't it? And he became well-known for that shape. He played around with different types of forms throughout his career, and this is the one he ended up really settling on, and very typical of what he would do. Just put a monochromatic ground or sort of monochromatic. You can see subtle colors in the background. And then he would use his left hand to create this kind of shape. Looks like a punctuation mark left hand for the one on the left switch hands. And then for the one on the right, he would use his right hand. Speaker 1 (37:41): Oh, cool. Speaker 2 (37:41): But these little subtleties of the staples being evident, I kind of like that about it. Speaker 1 (37:46): Do you happen to know if he was a lefty or a righty? Speaker 2 (37:48): I don't know. Speaker 1 (37:49): I don't know which Speaker 2 (37:50): Hand he privileged. Usually Speaker 1 (37:52): I kind of want to know then now I'm looking at these. If he started with the left, it makes me think maybe he was a lefty. But I mean, the shapes are so Speaker 2 (38:01): Similar, Speaker 1 (38:02): Aren't they? Speaker 2 (38:02): But also unusual. Speaker 1 (38:05): Yeah. It's hard to necessarily know which is the dominant hand, Speaker 2 (38:10): Which Speaker 1 (38:11): Is not. I could also see that it would be interesting to start with your less dominant hand where there's less control and you might come up with something a little more unexpected where your dominant hand is more likely to create something expected. And so then it's kind of interesting to have to imitate that the accident. I hope that's the story now that I've talked my way through this. I hope that's the case. This one is great. This one also, I think is one of the only things with a really recognizable image. I mean, there's a few hands in the show actually now that I said that Speaker 2 (38:49): Louisa Chase had this sort of cartoony looking hands, right? Speaker 1 (38:53): Yeah. And this is Lois Lane, which is, I laughed when I saw that too. I was like, Lois Lane. Okay. Is Speaker 2 (39:00): That Clark Kent's girlfriend? I don't Speaker 1 (39:01): Think Speaker 2 (39:02): So. Speaker 1 (39:02): Yeah. Speaker 2 (39:04): But it's interesting that you mentioned the image in this because Lois Lane, Robert Moscowitz that did the windmill that we saw earlier, and then Susan Rothenberg horse image, those three artists were part of an exhibition called The New Image Painting at the Whitney in 1978. So the year prior to this exhibition, and became known for sort of combining abstraction and representation in Speaker 1 (39:29): The Speaker 2 (39:29): Work. So it's very astute of you to notice that those three artists are really the ones that are the most image based. And then Louisa Chase, who I just mentioned with the cartoony hands and sort of the thunderbolts coming out of them that we saw when we first made our first left turn back there, she was, she's also associated with that movement. Speaker 1 (39:50): I like that there is something whimsical about these stretchy arms and the hands are not, they don't have all the strict anatomy of a real hand. So there is something a little cartoony. Speaker 2 (40:07): It Speaker 1 (40:07): Makes them a little silly and fun, which is not maybe what people expect from an abstract painting. So it is kind of, I like the way Speaker 2 (40:18): They kind of look like trees in a way, don't they? Speaker 1 (40:21): With Speaker 2 (40:21): Tall trunks and a few branches at the top, Speaker 1 (40:24): And then just like inexplicably, one fingertip is all white on one, and the pinky finger on another is all white. I mean, that's the other interesting thing is they're not a pair of hands too. Speaker 2 (40:35): They're both left hands, right? Speaker 1 (40:39): I mean, when you see two hands, your mind assumes that they belong to the same body, but here they don't. And I think this is another great example of that kind of black on black where we have two shades of black and one that's more, I think, more reflective. Yeah. The sort of background Black is more reflective, I think, than the hand black, which is more matte. And I wonder, is it just unpainted? I mean, it's primed, probably like Speaker 2 (41:09): The white areas. Yeah, you're right. Yep. Speaker 1 (41:11): It's just an unpainted area. I think that's what it looks like to me. She's primed the canvas, so it's very white, and then it's just these little areas not filled in. Speaker 2 (41:24): Right, Speaker 1 (41:24): Which that changes the story to me Speaker 2 (41:26): A little bit too. Yeah, a little bit, Speaker 1 (41:27): Doesn't it? It's not that it's a painted white finger. It's an unpainted finger, Speaker 2 (41:32): The forgotten finger. Speaker 1 (41:34): And then we're coming to the one that literally made me go, whoa, when I first walked around the space, Howard Buchwald, another untitled painting. But then this one has a parenthetical title reconsidering Rex Redis and Inversion. Speaker 2 (41:56): Yes. So this Howard Buchwald became well-known for literally piercing his canvases. So you'll see here, Russell, there's a lot of unprimed canvas in this painting. And these arcs of canvas connect one portal to another, each one of them. And the portals, there's actually a highly crafted wooden portal through which the canvas continues. So the uns canvas or the primed canvas, excuse me, continues into that sort of perforation. So it's about, what would you say, two and a half inches deep, that perforation and the stretchers themselves. Speaker 1 (42:40): Yeah. Speaker 2 (42:41): And then there's these marks, each of them about six inches long, every color under the rainbow, practically black, red, yellow, green, blue, white, that sort of fill in the space in between each of these arcs of unprimed canvas that connect the portals. Speaker 1 (42:59): Yeah. The effect is just, it's really interesting. I don't know. It's a painting so much about its surface. There's so much detail on the surface, but then to go through the actual surface, it's kind of mind bending in that way. And like you said, they're so finely crafted that they don't feel violent or anything. They're at these angles and they feel very purposeful, but they also feel like, again, this is something a guard should watch out for because they feel like a perfect finger size, so don't they? Speaker 2 (43:34): Yeah. Especially here, you can kind of see the wall behind and the one on the very bottom, the other ones, you can't see what's behind, but the one at the very bottom, from the right vantage point, you can see the white wall behind. Speaker 1 (43:45): Yeah. It plays with the idea of dimension in some way. It takes my mind to sort of sci-fi places of representing other dimensions or something in this strange way. Well, are there any last thoughts you had or wanted to let people know about since we've kind of made the circle Speaker 2 (44:06): Here? Yeah, now we're back to where we began. And I guess the other point I wanted to make is that I think it's really profound that this exhibition of paintings is happening taking place in Frank Verna's former studio because we know him best as a painter. So the reason for the way this room was originally used is sort of bringing us back to that. Speaker 1 (44:26): Yeah, yeah. Bringing the focus on painting in a space. Yeah. You pointed out before we started recording has been a mix of painting and sculpture, so it's rare to see it only Speaker 2 (44:38): Dedicated Speaker 1 (44:39): To painting. Definitely. Definitely not a Veeck painting. Speaker 2 (44:42): Definitely not. But again, Veeck was ahead of his time, some people would say, and some of these, Barbara Rose, the curator, was certainly thinking these paintings were ahead of their time too. Speaker 1 (44:55): Well, and you don't have to go that many generations away from Duveneck to see the students he taught, who went on, and the people he influenced, and the way that his sort of, at the time, wild Brushwork turned into sort of the much more expressionistic styles later. So I mean, really, it is still a part of that lineage very clearly. Speaker 2 (45:21): Yeah. Speaker 1 (45:22): Well, thank you so much for being my guest Speaker 2 (45:23): Today. It's been a pleasure. Really. A hundred percent. I've loved talking to you about this stuff. Great. Speaker 1 (45:34): Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the art yourself. The museum is currently open, but please visit our website for the most up-to-date information about operating hours, and also to reserve your advanced online registration, which is required to limit capacity. The museum has been selling out often on the weekend, so you'll definitely want to reserve your spot before making a trip. Current special exhibitions are American Painting, the eighties Revisited Future Retrieval, close parallel. Frank Nik, American Master and Anum aga, all the flowers are for me. You can follow the museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and we also have an Art Palace Facebook group. Our theme song is Aron Mu by Balala. And as always, please rate and review us to help others find the show. I'm Russell Iig, and this has been Art Palace, produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.