Jonathan Silver

J.Silver in studio, 1983

“Silver’s sculpture is steeped in classical and religious myth.  It is assembled, however, with a keen sense of modernist history, in particular, of the formal and psychological implications of Cubism and Surrealism.  In Silver’s work, myth is not quiet and controllable, but something that grows and evolves on its own and obliges mere mortals to flail away in its wake.” (Michael Brenson, 1984, The New York Times)

Barbarian killing his wife, 1985

Jonathan Silver was born in New York City in 1937.  He decided not to go to high school, preferring to be educated by tutors at home.  He received a B.S. degree in general studies from Columbia University and later enrolled in the Art History Ph.D. program under the famed historian, Meyer Schapiro.  Schapiro was impressed by Silver’s intellectual prowess and supported his dissertation on Giacometti.  Silver, however, started making sculpture seriously in the late 1960’s and never completed his doctorate.  As a Columbia student, he drew in Peter Agostini’s class between 1960 and 1966, where he met future colleagues Christopher Cairns and Bruce Gagnier in 1965.

head, 1974, plaster

head, 1975, plaster

During the 1970’s Silver worked alongside Cairns, collaborating on ideas for heads and figures.  The two approached their work with the ambition and stamina of scientists tackling big questions, in it for the long haul; it was clear they neither expected, nor were interested in, quick or dramatically “personalized” solutions.  Cairns and Silver developed a common method of assembling and reassembling, or embedding fragments of one head or figure into another, thus creating new works.  The sculpture produced during this period was shown by Silver and Cairns at the 4x10 Gallery in New York in 1976.  The same year they showed at Haverford College’s Comfort Gallery with their fellow alumnus from Agostini’s class, Bruce Gagnier.  Cairns and Silver also exhibited together at the Weatherspoon Gallery in Greensboro, NC, in 1978, and at the New York Studio School in 1979.

Agamemnon, 1977, mixed media

Silver began working on larger figures in the early 80’s.  Abounding with classical, mythical and art historical references, these ambitious works further developed the method of combining and recombining elements from several different pieces.  Elaborately constructed, they often included found objects or sections of the plaster molds themselves. Wounded Amazon, which is in the Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden, dates from this period.  Silver liked to say his work “tended towards the Greco-Oriental.”

Wounded Amazon, 1984, plaster

A visit to the Medici Chapel while traveling in Italy with Cairns in 1982 was formative.  Silver began experimenting with placing groups of figures together in a room, leading to his Room Dedicated to Septimius Severus, exhibited with other large pieces at the Gruenbaum Gallery in Soho in 1985.  Shows at the Victoria Munroe Gallery followed in the early 1990’s.

Chapel of Septimius Severus, 1985-86

During the last seven years of his life, Silver worked on rooms of sculpture, including the Lower Room installed at the Sculpture Center in 1990.  Consisting of a dramatic ensemble of figures evoking the disabling effects of memory and aging, the room was filled with figures seized by uncontrollable and incomprehensible forces.  Silver’s late works were often scenes of torment or rage, where the expressionistic surface treatment contributed to their high emotional pitch.

The Lower Room, 1989, mixed media

“Silver’s figures are survivors.  They are vulnerable, yet unalterable, sacrificial, yet in command.  Violence has been done to them, but through their statuesque power, or through the force of their will or rage, they retain the ability to avenge or punish, and to impose themselves on their situations.”  (Michael Brenson, 1995)

Birth of Venus, 1985-86

Chance, 1987-1990, plaster

Silver spent his entire life drawing from the model.  He would stand at an easel, drawing with a number 2 pencil, making small, exquisitely constructed figure drawings.  He also drew incessantly while watching television.

head, 1977, mixed media

To support himself, Silver taught Art History at Montclair State College in Montclair, NJ.  Noreen Sanders, a student of his in the late 70’s, wrote in an email, "In class, he would walk up on the stage, in front of the screen and directly into the paintings he put in the slide projector… talking passionately about the piece (good or bad) – smoking Kool cigarettes with his saggy-ass jeans and bits of plaster stuck in his hair.  He would assign novels from the same time period.  Before class, you could catch him playing piano – some Schubert piece or other.  Or he’d recite poetry.  For me, the work came alive." 

Silver was a frequent lecturer and visiting critic at the New York Studio School and at Haverford College, where he had a profound influence on students for over twenty years, inspiring those who worked closely with him by his penetrating intelligence, erudition and aesthetic probity and his willingness to share his perceptions.  Silver wrote and published extensively on art historical topics.  His articles on Giacometti and David Smith were published by ArtNews.

The New Gretchen, 1991

Jonathan Silver died in New York in 1992 at the age of 54.  There was a posthumous show of his heads at the Sculpture Center in 1996 and one of heads and figures at Lori Bookstein Fine Art in 2008, co-curated by Cairns’ son Nicholas.

figure, 1983

Text adapted with permission from an essay in the exhibition catalog for the 2006 show Five Sculptors.

Additional photos of Jonathan Silver's work can be viewed on our Flickr page.

Photo of Silver is from the announcement card of the 2008 exhibition of his work at Lori Bookstein Fine Art.

See also:
Jonathan Silver: Drawings
Jonathan Silver's Studio, As Photographed by Michael O'Keefe

Christopher Cairns on Earl Kerkam

You can look all you want to on the internet, but will find very little about the painter Earl Cavis Kerkam. And what little you do find will be deeply unsatisfactory. There are biographies on Artnet, etc. (if you want to pay for them) listing general dates, events and places--all of which are of little interest. 

                                                    Self-portrait, 1963 

I saw my first Kerkam painting in the early seventies in a show at the New York Studio School on 8th Street.  It was a small oil, an abstract frontal head from the early sixties. The painting belonged to the Poindexter family who ran the Poindexter Gallery in the 1950’s and 60’s. This gallery showed Earl Kerkam as well as George Spaventa. Years later, in 2005, I got to show one of my sculptures in a show at the NYSS which included this very same Kerkam painted head. At that time, as well as 35 years prior, I wanted to steal this little beauty. This particular painting, in and of itself, puts Kerkam in the top rank of American painters of the 20th century. Check out some of the others. Forgotten though he is, Kerkam had some extraordinary strengths.

In the early 1970’s, my friend Jonathan Silver and I were both working on frontal sculpted (and drawn) heads. I told him about the outstanding little painting at the NYSS and together we took a look. This little Kerkam head had a big effect on us both. Of course there were many other things that we also had on our minds during those years, including Roman heads, Medardo Rosso, psychoanalysis, Hans Holbein, Giacometti, Ernst Gombrich, Ernst Kris and F.X. Messerschmidt. But this head had a big impact on both of us.

Earl Kerkam lived in New York and Paris. He had a regular job for many years and also a wife and three kids--and then, a la Gauguin, he abandoned his family and spent the rest of his life painting, seemingly on his own.  Two articles in Art News, one by Elaine de Kooning (“Kerkam Makes a Painting”) and one by Louis Finkelstein, make unsuccessful stabs at shedding light on this artist. There are a few catalogues of his work, principally one from a 1966 memorial show at the Washington Museum of Modern Art, now long since defunct.

For a clearer idea of this artist, one must go to the paintings themselves (and photographs of the artist in his studio) along with a few quotes and anecdotes that can be retrieved from the scrapheap of history.

 
Pictures show Kerkam painting, shirtless or in an old-fashioned undershirt, in a dilapidated and disheveled studio, often with a model. Various photographers took pictures of him, and a number can be seen in the records of the Archives of American Art.  No one knows how he managed to make a living. His friends Pollock, de Kooning and Kline saw him as uncompromising. Pollock is said to have waved a postcard in the Cedar Tavern one night declaring, “Earl says that I’m not bad!” (This postcard came after Kerkam had seen a Pollock show in Paris.) Franz Kline said that “Earl could paint in a telephone booth.”

                                                   Kerkam in Studio 1950's

Kerkam had a curious approach to painting. Often using a model, he might start with a voluptuous female model and by the time the painting was finished it would have morphed into a strong male figure.  He seems to have had a generalized idea of the figure, perhaps derived from his own physique. On the other hand, his portraits of the 30’s and 40’s often have a very specific look, as if they are particular people. It is interesting to learn, however, that he often used multiple models for the same portrait, so the specificity very well might have been a conglomeration or synthesis of their individual attributes. In this way he was a bit like Sherwood Anderson. Kerkam himself said, “I try to paint a construction instead of a sensation.” Earl Kerkam was obsessed with painting. “I can’t talk French, but I can paint French,” he liked to say.

One finds this on the Mercury Gallery site: 

“An artist must get rid of all encumbrances,” [Kerkam] told a friend. His apartment was “so sparsely furnished," wrote Finkelstein in Art News, “that it did not look furnished at all… There was a broken-down cot with a slab of foam rubber… [and] a bucket  for washing his clothes (which he sometimes let burn on the stove while he was painting)"... Once, a Seattle heiress arrived with $1,000 to have Kerkam paint her picture. He opened his door a crack, gave her the once-over and said: “You're too pretty. Go away.”

On a more obscure website is this: “Earl Kerkam was holding court at his one-man show at the Bonestell Gallery. He was complaining that some of his models refused to pose in the nude…'Well paint them with their clothes on!' someone said. 'That’s no good,' answered Kerkam. 'Painting a woman who won’t take her clothes off is like interviewing a woman who won’t tell the truth.' Max Weber hit the nail on the head when he said: “Kerkam has more art in a stroke than most men get in a whole painting.” One can see this written all over his paintings.

                                                        Head of man, 1940's 

Kerkam showed at the Poindexter Gallery, the World House Gallery and the Charles Egan Gallery. Galleries were different in those days. Artists did not snivel at the feet of the gallerist, as is now the practice. A gallery director or owner like Charles Egan or Stephen Radich or Curt Valentine took a direct personal interest in their artists. The relationship was partly business, partly personal, a far cry from the strictly commercial business strictures of today. Egan would support his artist whether or not she or he sold, and sales weren’t common. In other words, he gave them a modest stipend. Poindexter must have done the same.

People can make all the excuses they want--about why things were the way they were then and why things are the way that they are now--but these are only hapless excuses masking a deep and unabiding lack of aesthetics and feeling on the part of all contemporary gallery owners. In the 1940’s and 50’s, gallery owners would take care of their artists. Later, in the seventies, newer owners really learned to “take care” of their artists. 

Earl Kerkam died at the age of 74 in 1965, shortly after beginning to teach at the newly formed New York Studio School. Mercedes Matter thought he would be a good teacher but he did not live long enough for anyone to find out. The painter Chuck O’Connor has fond memories of Earl Kerkam in the fall of 1964. I either did or did not meet Earl Kerkam, although I like to think that I did.

After all is said and done, we have to let the paintings speak for themselves and rely on the audience to establish the necessary context for these works--if that is possible in this day and age.

After Kerkam’s death, Zabriskie Gallery had a show of his work. Hilton Kramer, the vaunted art reviewer for The New York Times, led Kerkam on his way to oblivion with a review entitled "Earl Kerkam: A Sensibility Unfulfilled; Late Painter's Work on View..." You can look up the review and pay to read it, but why bother? Kramer did the same shit with Peter Agostini. This guy Kramer was the worst--and he did a great deal of damage.

Here is a review by Victoria Donohoe from 1967. (In 2010, Victoria Donohoe continues to write her fine reviews for The Philadelphia Inquirer.):

Earl Kerkam Show: Elegant Fleshiness

The Philadelphia Inquirer--Sunday, November 12, 1967


The Earl Kerkam (1891-1965) show at Johnny Aiello's “Gallery Pane Vino,” 20th Street at Pine, must surely be one of the best contemporary drawing exhibitions displayed in a gallery here. These 62 drawings have been lying unseen, mostly unknown except to a few scholars, and they come from the only large source of supply of the artist's work--a collection of about 400 drawings and 200 oil paintings belonging to his son, E. Bruce Kirk, of Chestnut Hill, who displayed a few of the paintings at Wanamaker's last season and will show a larger group of the oils at New York's Zabriskie Gallery in January.

The drawings are nearly all spontaneous, unpretentious studies of the nude female figure and were created around the early 1950's as notes of fact and ideas rather than as developed essays. In their concentration of the artist's style, the few swift, decisive lines with a brush, chalk and watercolor speak with a personal intensity that tells us more than his painterly Cubist self-portraits or even his sensuous still lifes. And the finest of them have a weight, a sense of fleshiness and elegant informality of line that swing their lift into high art. Since drawings are an art for close-range inspection, the close grouping here, sometimes in double rows, favors them. This small gallery must be congratulated on its initiative in organizing the present show--a step that should long since have been taken by some of our more august institutions. It is also worth remembering that at the time of Kerkam's death, his friends de Kooning, Guston, Rothko, Spaventa and Vicente petitioned the Museum of Modern Art to plan an exhibit in honor of this man who "in our eyes is one of the finest painters to come out of America."

I was always struck by the disconnect between Kerkam’s painting and his drawing. His drawings were appealing to many people, but I always found them preposterously stylized compared to his painting, which show much more uncertainty and a shifting decisiveness.

Today, older paintings of Kerkam's from the 40’s and 50’s occasionally show up on the internet or in obscure auctions. I purchased two portraits, one male, one female, each for under $225. Kevin Tuttle bought his fine portrait for about the same amount. 

Later I bought three 1930’s paintings at an auction house in DC for $1100. Here is one of them:

                                           Red shoes with vase, 1930's

At the opening of a retrospective show at the World House Gallery in NY in 1963, a friend asked Kerkam, “Where are all the people?” “They’ll come when I die," Kerkam replied. “I’m not a fashionable man.” As Earl Kerkam recedes slowly into the mists of time, we can now guess that he was incorrect in his assessment of impending fame. His most recent auctioned painting, a small abstract head from the 1960’s, fetched $700.

                                                 head 1953

See additional photos of Kerkam's work on our Flickr page.

Christopher Cairns is a sculptor and Professor Emeritus at Haverford College.  See his work online at www.christophercairns.com.  

Peter Agostini

(Peter Agostini, 151 Avenue B, 1960)

"That is the prime thing—to generate 'up'—leverage, elevation. The balloons rising, clothes on a line being picked up by the wind. The same with my horses. Whatever use they are, my horses are about flight, bursting out."
(Peter Agostini)

(Balloon Fountain, 1962, plaster)

Peter Agostini exploded on the New York art scene in 1959 with his first one-man show at the Galerie Grimaud. He was 45 years old. In 1960, he began showing at the Stephen Radich Gallery and, over the next few years, was celebrated by Time and Art News and participated in the 1964 World’s Fair exhibition, alongside Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Mallary.

Prior to his debut, Agostini worked as a mold and mannequin maker, skills he learned during the Depression as part of the WPA. He made sculpture in his kitchen, which doubled as a studio. In this tiny space he made horses, burlesque queens, and heads in clay and wax.

"One person who really motivated my mind was Michelangelo. Raphael was another. And Botticelli. What about their works? I have no idea . . . the essence—the life force—that they imbued into their pieces. They made what was, real. I’m not talking about realism. I’m talking about creating a reality." (Peter Agostini)

(Marina head, 1945, bronze)

(figure, 1957, bronze)

Peter Agostini was born in Hell’s Kitchen, a then-tough neighborhood on New York’s West Side, in 1913. His mother died when he was three, and he spent some time at a school for orphans before his early education in a Catholic school, which ceased after the eighth grade. Agostini was a self-taught artist whose only art training was one year at the Leonardo Da Vinci School in midtown, a school run by the sculptor Onario Ruotolo and sponsored by Benito Mussolini. Ambitious from the start, he made a 40” plaster figure, The Swimmer, while in attendance. At Leonardo Da Vinci, Agostini met artists George Spaventa and Nicolas Carone, with whom he had life-long friendships.

In the late 1950’s, Agostini moved into his first studio on 10th Street. His work of that time was impulsive, and to accommodate its spontaneity, he began fashioning sculpture directly in plaster, working it in its fluid state. In the 60’s, his plaster work was distinctive for its extreme immediacy. Anticipating Pop Art imagery, he cast and assembled with incredible assuredness newspapers, balloons, egg cartons, clotheslines, pillows, corrugated cardboard, truck inner tubes, bottles – all sorts of disparate objects – “frozen from life.” He made “instant sculpture” whose characteristics were speed, luminosity, and explosiveness that ran the gamut from figurative to abstract. He had a great gift for enlivening inert matter, and a fluid control of the unyielding materials he used.

"His forms totally are seductively inviting. They are nerve-wrackingly intense, made now, for now . . . live now, die later." (Art News, Dec. 1960)

(Squeeze, 1963, bronze)

(Saracen, 1960, bronze)

In 1960, Agostini was hired by Andre Racz at Columbia to teach sculpture and drawing. He had had no previous teaching experience and had to invent his own way. His approach was to direct the student’s observation through demonstration, without giving any verbal instruction. This hands-off teaching style appealed to many young students, including Christopher Cairns, Bruce Gagnier and Jonathan Silver. As a teacher Agostini combined an intense charismatic charm with a certain detachment, always putting emphasis on personal expression. His approach had no artifice and his presence was electric. He consequently had many devoted students. In 1969 he joined Spaventa on the faculty of the New York Studio School where he often worked from the model alongside his students. Agostini also taught for many years at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and was a Distinguished Visitor at Haverford College.

In the 1970’s and 80’s, Agostini returned to figuration, producing a series of old men, female heads and large horses. For Agostini, there was no difference between representation and abstraction. In their commitment to mass and form and in the masterful modeling technique employed, these works were as related to his “swells” and “squeezes” of the 1960’s, as they were influenced by Michelangelo and Leonardo. Grounded in his lifelong habit of drawing from the figure, and reflecting his personal experience of aging, these works demonstrate consummate observation and distillation of form, and marriage of subject to that form.

"Meaning is always a big problem. Like in art, you don’t really know how to get it. But when it happens, it’s already enough. The power of meaning is a very, very difficult thing to approach." (Peter Agostini)

(Apollo, 1975, bronze)

Agostini showed regularly at the Radich Gallery until 1969, when the gallery closed. He subsequently showed at the Zabriskie and Bernice Steinbaum Galleries, among others. By the end of his life, Agostini’s work would appear in more than 25 one-man shows and more than 100 group shows world-wide. His work can be found in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Walker Art Center.

(Winter Wall, 1962, plaster)

(Burlesque Queen, 1965, plaster)

(The Hurricane, 1962, plaster)

Peter Agostini died in 1993 at the age of 80 at his home in Manhattan.

Text adapted with permission from an essay in the exhibition catalog for the 2006 show Five Sculptors.

Additional photos of Peter Agostini’s work can be viewed on our Flickr page.

The 2nd, 8th, 9th and 10th photos (from top) were taken by Don Cook.

See also:

Peter Agostini's 12th Street Studio, as Photographed by David Carrow

Agostini in Soho (a guest post by Scott Sherk)

George Spaventa

George...was a man of eloquent silences. His work breathes with the eloquence of his muteness. (Elaine de Kooning, 1978)

                                                             Torso, 1968, 21"h, bronze 
George Spaventa was a thoughtful, somewhat reclusive artist who claimed that the ideas for his sculpture came to him in dreams. He was born in New York City in 1918, where he studied as a teenager at the Leonardo Da Vinci Art School. After serving in the military during World War II, Spaventa studied art in Paris on the G.I. Bill. There, he worked with Ossip Zadkine, visited Brancusi in his studio, and had the good fortune of meeting Giacometti, one of his great influences.

Spaventa's work was small, intimate, molded by hand in clay or wax and later cast in bronze. Besides Giacometti, his influences included Medardo Rosso and David Smith. In a 1964 Art News review of Spaventa's first and only New York solo show during his lifetime, his good friend, the poet Frank O'Hara, described his work:

In Spaventa, the emphasis is on the hand, and handling. With the single exception of Nakian, it is difficult to think of an American sculptor who has insisted more upon the imprint of his finger, thumb, wrist and arm. Sensitivity to the material is there, but first and foremost the material itself is required to be capable of sensitivity to Spaventa.

                                                             Head, 1955, 17"h, bronze
He was a methodical worker, not particularly prolific, and it wasn't until he was in his mid-forties that he had his first solo show, the first of just two. His work was exhibited in a number of group shows, however, in the 50s and 60s, including the Annual Exhibition 1962 at the Whitney Museum, and an exhibition entitled, Four American Sculptors, which also included Peter Agostini.

Spaventa was especially well liked and admired by many sculptors and painters of his time. He was particularly associated with a group of artists who worked on Tenth Street in New York City, and developed what came to be identified as the "Tenth Street Style." They included, among others, Milton Resnick, Earl Kerkam, Franz Kline, Peter Agostini, and Willem de Kooning, with whom Spaventa was sometimes compared, and who once said about him, "When I look at George's sculptures, I wish I had made them myself."

Spaventa was one of the founding faculty members of the New York Studio School, where he taught until he died. Students remember him perpetually encircled by a cloud of smoke, ashes dropping from the lit cigarette in his mouth onto the clay as he rearranged their pieces with crushing movements and inarticulate grunts.

Spaventa found verbal expression difficult and would demonstrate with his hands and whole body in making a point. During the late 70s he would often comment on the work of Matisse, Michelangelo, and Brancusi using the words "oneness...plasticity..." over and over. He spoke about visiting Brancusi on Sundays when all the artists opened their studios. He once asked Brancusi about The Endless Column. Brancusi answered only by breathing deeply. George interpreted this to suggest that the column was about breath. He would often refer to a picture in the Matisse Sculpture book of Jaguar Devouring a Hare after Barye. He would demonstrate how Matisse simplified the thrust of the jaguar by drawing his finger (with dry clay on it) along the form on the page. I am sure that that streak of clay is still on the book in the Studio School Library. (Scott Sherk, 2006)

Despite the public nature of his teaching life, Spaventa spent much of his time alone, in a life dedicated to art. He died of a heart attack in his studio in 1978. His work has been shown just twice since his death.

                                                          Figure #1, 1963, 13"h, bronze
I originally wrote this essay for the 2006 catalog for Five Sculptors, an exhibition of work by Peter Agostini, Christopher Cairns, Bruce Gagnier, Jonathan Silver, and George Spaventa.

Photos of sculpture courtesy of  Christopher Cairns and Vita Litvak
Photo of Spaventa from 1979 Gruenebaum Gallery catalogue.

Sources:

O'Hara, Frank. "Introducing the Sculpture of George Spaventa." Art News, April 1964, p. 15.


Kramer, Hilton. "Uptown: Intimate Sculptures Grace Tribute to George Spaventa." The New York Times, 11 January 1980.


Exhibition Catalogue:  A Tribute to George Spaventa, New York: Gruenebaum Gallery, Ltd., 1979.