Zwischen Leben und Tod [Between Life and Death]: twenty-two pieces after images by Peter Weiss // by Michael Hersch

Die Maschinen griefen die Menschheit an

I first learned of Peter Weiss’s (1916-1982) artwork almost a decade ago while reading W.G. Sebald’s (1944-2001) On the Natural History of Destruction. Sebald’s writing -- as it has on many others -- made a deep impression on me, so much so that fragments from his poem After Nature form a framework for my horn and cello work, Last Autumn (2008). Isolated lines, or groups of lines, from the poem came to mind as I was writing the piece. Particular verbal images captured in shape or texture much of what I felt. When Last Autumn is performed, however, Sebald’s texts are not sung or recited; it is purely instrumental music. I placed the texts at designated junctures in the written score before various movements of music. The texts did, and still do, represent a kind of private communication between me and Sebald’s words. This kind of dialog between composers and poets is nothing new, of course. There are many examples across the centuries of composers writing music with outside texts in quiet co-existence. 

Some five years later, the artwork of Peter Weiss had a similar effect on me, but Weiss’s paintings and drawings had a more direct impact on the music. Weiss’s spectrum of color and motion, of proportion and spacing, struck me as particularly musical, and I found this both provocative and inspiring. While Sebald’s texts had acted as companions which reinforced and heightened my own state of mind, Weiss’s environments included both familiar and alien worlds that I wanted to capture directly in sound. In either case, I felt at home. For the first time, I felt compelled to engage directly with images through music. 

I had only known of Peter Weiss as a playwright before reading Sebald’s essay about him. While I was familiar with some of his searing stage dramas, I did not know that from the time he was a young man he was a serious visual artist as well. One of his earliest works, Selbsporträt zwischen Tod und Schwester (Self-portrait between Death and Sister), was completed in 1935 after the death of his sister in an accident. The drawing has many hallmarks of his later writing and artwork: pronounced disquiet, looming threat, wistfulness. I find compelling that Weiss, from one work to the next, takes an active or more participatory, or more passive and detached, stance toward his subjects - especially in the paintings expressing what appears to be terror or grief, or both of these states simultaneously. Throughout his work there are also recurring images that seem deeply meditative; for example, animate and even inanimate subjects lost in thought. 

Selbsporträt zwischen Tod und Schwester

In his essay on the artist, subtitled On Memory and Cruelty in the Work of Peter Weiss, Sebald discusses several of the paintings, including Das grosse Welttheater (The Great World Theater), which he describes as 

“... a pandemonium of transgression in front of a background of capsizing ships and lit by the reflection of a conflagration ... it denotes a now permanent state of destruction. What is seen, here and now, is already an underworld beyond anything natural, a surreal region of industrial complexes and machines, chimneys, silos, viaducts, walls, labyrinths, leafless trees, and cheap fairground attractions …” 

Das grosse Welttheater

In Weiss’ Gartenkonzert (Concert in the Garden) Sebald sees

“... figures with lowered eyelids ... including the young harpsichordist with his blind gaze, are among the harbingers of a life surviving at best only in the sensation of pain, in unreserved identification with the despised, scorned, crippled, and fading, with those who sit weeping in their concealment …” 

Das Gartenkonzert

Though each of these paintings is quite different, below the surface similar tensions roil. 

Zwischen Leben und Tod is a program-length work for violin and piano. The music is structured in twenty-two movements, each movement corresponding to a particular image by Weiss. This is my third work that has had a relationship with visual art; the others are Images From a Closed Ward (after etchings by Michael Mazur) and Black Untitled (after a painting of the same name by Willem de Kooning). Of the three pieces, Zwischen Leben und Tod is most closely intertwined with the artwork, while my approach in Images From a Closed Ward and Black Untitled was closer to that of Last Autumn. 

While I did not know him personally, W.G. Sebald gave me two great gifts: his writing itself which has been, and continues to be, a source of solace and inspiration, and an introduction to Peter Weiss’s artwork. I am neither an art historian nor literary critic. But I hope, as Sebald did, that more people may discover the artwork of this extraordinary figure. 

At the conclusion of his essay, Sebald quotes a passage from Weiss’s Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance): 

“O Herakles. The light is dim, my pencil blunt. I would have wished to write it all differently. But the time is too short. And I have run out of paper.” 

Junge im Garten

Translations of W.G. Sebald into English from the original German by Anthea Bell  

Der Krieg

Michael Hersch (b. 1971) is a composer and pianist.

Michael Hersch's Zwischen Leben und Tod: twenty-two pieces after images by Peter Weiss receives its world premiere on February 26, 2015 at the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University, performed by violinist Carolyn Huebl and pianist Mark Wait.

Kevin Tuttle at the Martin Art Gallery, 2012

Altar to an Unknown God, 1989-91

Kevin Tuttle's Comings and Goings ran from August 29 to September 23, 2012 at Muhlenberg College's Martin Art Gallery. Below is the artist statement that accompanied the show.

Soto! Explore thyself!

Therein thyself shalt find
The "Undiscovered Continent"—
No Settler had the Mind.

-- Emily Dickinson

The work presented here is selected from about a 30 year time frame. It chronicles a journey from decorative, to reductive formal, to subject-narrative driven work. However, even in the decorative work there was the beginning of subject matters that would unwittingly resurface over the span of many years.

There are a number of influences in the work from literature and poetry; and from Greek/Roman and Chinese/Japanese painting and sculpture to contemporary artists such as Christopher Cairns, Jonathan Silver, and Anselm Kiefer. I have tried to have no fear of influence. I have been guided by statements from other artists such as Goethe and Matisse who advocate for the possibility of being influenced. In particular I’ve been guided by Matisse who felt that an avoidance of influence is an act of insincerity. I also have taken courage from his ability to periodically re-form himself especially during the period of 1915-1917. While one of the preeminent artists in the world, and at the age of 45-47, he undertook a belated response to cubism and also reaffirmed his much earlier statement and heritage, “if Cezanne is right, then I am right.”

But possibly the primary linkage between the work shown here is not a development of ideas from one point to another. Rather, it is that due to both scale and general homeliness there likely is no future for these works. So, thank you to the Martin Art Gallery for the opportunity to see the work together for the first and last time.

A Death blow is a Life blow to Some

Who till they died, did not alive become—

Who had they lived, had died but when
They died, Vitality begun.

-- Emily Dickinson


Click on photos to enlarge.

Le Tombeau de Baudelaire

Voyage to Cythera



Blackwater - Exsanguination



Uselessys, 1988-89



        Palatine Hill (detail, Uselessys), oil on panel, 12" x 8", 1994



In Light Of (Interior)



Herm'unculus



Almost Aquamarine, 1985

 

 

Death of Artists



In Light Of (Interior)

Photos courtesy of Kevin Tuttle.








Charles Seliger // by Nicholas Cairns

Charles Seliger (1926-2009) represents an interesting crosscurrent to the general trend lines of what is called the Abstract Expressionist movement. A first generation AbExer, albeit the youngest of the group, Seliger somehow managed to avoid the pitfalls of both the fame and the ridiculous obsession with scale that plagued so many of his contemporaries. Throughout a career that spanned seven decades, he was able to maintain a near monofocus on his interest, which, as he stated very early on, was to ‘apostrophize micro-reality’.

Hidden Skeleton  1945

Creating small paintings that rarely exceeded 30 inches in any dimension, and were often much smaller, Seliger painted an intimate world of kaleidoscopic and biomorphic forms that suggest microcosmic life. In his own words: “My work, even when most abstract, reflects the natural world. Strata of the earth, forms relating to botany and biology and the ocean depths, all figure in the imagery of my work, no matter how abstract. The images are developed with a feeling for the intricacy of the structure of matter. There is a sense of something happening organically among the forms. The images are changing, there is suggestion of movement in the earth, of botanical development, always a sense of growth. A metamorphosis occurs.”

Chrysanthemums  1952

           

In his teens and early 20’s, Seliger developed a close association with two figures who would prove to be instrumental in his maturation as an artist. Seliger first met Jimmy Ernst in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim’s renowned Art of this Century gallery, where Jimmy was Peggy’s secretary and where Seliger had his first one man show in 1945 at the age of 19. On the first day that they met, Jimmy, after seeing one of Seliger’s paintings, suggested that Charles look at the British publication, London Bulletin, that presented the work of European Surrealist artists like Jimmy’s father, the German painter Max Ernst. The work presented in this magazine, particularly that of Max Ernst, had a profound effect on Seliger and it was through careful study of these Surrealist paintings that Charles began to develop a painting method that used a variety of automatic means to generate a range of unpredictable and non-preconceived naturalistic imagery. It was these processes and the imagery that emerged from them that would serve as the bedrock of his work for the rest of his career.

Luminous Field  1965

It was also during this early period that Seliger encountered Mark Tobey, a Pacific Northwest artist. Tobey, a Bahai, painted on a small scale and with a certain Eastern philosophical or mesmeric/mystical approach that connected to Seliger’s ethos. Tobey had quite an effect on many New York artists of the day, particularly Jackson Pollock, who made a habit of attending all of Tobey’s Willard Gallery shows in NYC, and whose most characteristic work appears, at times, to be simply a scaled up and sped up version of the intricately woven and near-etched paintings of Mark Tobey. But for Seliger, Tobey’s influence was more ingrained. Seliger, through Tobey, must have seen a legitimate alternative to the large scale, often breezy, paintings of the day in NYC, a way of painting that allowed for an attachment to the subject that was intimate and not distant, reflective and meditative, not concept or ‘action’ driven. And the small scale and finely drawn elements in the work of both Seliger and Tobey encourage a certain reflectivity on the part of viewers as well, in effect willing them to stand very close to the work, and to peer into it as one would into a telescope or microscope.

Prophecy 1985

Seliger lived most of his adult life in Mount Vernon, New York, where he maintained a full-time job at Commercial Decal for 5 decades. He painted at night when he returned from his job and, working slowly and steadily, often produced no more than 10 paintings a year. From 1989 to the present, Charles Seliger has been represented by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery on 57^th St. in NYC.

Runic Veil  1989

“'I need not be afraid of the void. The void is part of my person. I need to enter consciously into it.'  This is a quote from Paul Tillich… It struck me that it is this void I enter when I paint… by making it a part of yourself one can then deal better with the despair. For me the void is the endless changing-changeless world of organic being. Becoming from this void, I try to extract (from my experience during the process of painting) some visual evidence of what I see or feel in the void. No matter how I plan a painting, or try to work the concept out in advance, I fail. Only when I enter the painting as a void where I know nothing but must retrieve from the void evidence of my consciousness – evidence of the struggle of the organism to become, to emerge… only to pass again therein is the never ending cause of despair… but one must carry the void within – and not fear but rather celebrate its beauties, ecstasies and endless complication… beyond our minds. I never seem to know where my paintings come from – or how they come about. One must look into the emptiness and the artist must not come back empty handed." – 1972

Transcendence  1993

Nicholas Cairns is a painter who has exhibited in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Dallas. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, artist Elizabeth Wade. See his work online at www.nicholascairns.com.


All biographical details and quotes are taken from Charles Seliger by Francis O'Connor

           

Francoise Andre

Francoise Andre, 1962

“Andre’s work is full of the sense of what has been lost of certainty and stability in a world full of turmoil.”  (Victoria Donohoe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 2003)

“For me, painting is the act of uniting thinking and emotions regarding all that is happening in human evolution, by utilizing the means of all times, and even from more than one civilization.  All this is so terribly enormous, and I am not so amazed anymore to have spent so much time doing it.  I think . . . that man and the earth remain at the core of my research.”  (Francoise Andre, 1993, translated from the French)

Jan Cox, 1985, 2.10 x 2.2 m

                                    

When she was just five years old, Francoise Andre announced to her parents, “I want to be a painter.”  As the story goes, the three were standing hand-in-hand in front of Jan Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in the Cathedral of Ghent, Belgium.  The very next day, Andre’s father bought her paints and brushes, and she created her first painting, a tree with a single apple in it.

So began an artistic career that would eventually span almost eight decades and four countries on two continents.  By the end of her life, Andre’s work had appeared in exhibitions in Europe, Canada, and throughout the United States, including Philadelphia, Chicago, and Seattle.  Her paintings can be found in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D. C., and the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, among others.

Born in Vendee, France in 1926 to Franco-Belgian parents, Andre was a descendant of famed collector and Hellenist Alphonse Willems, composer Florent Schmitt, French revolutionary Talleyrand, and portraitists from the court of Louis XIV.  When Andre was a teenager in Belgium during the war, she and her family had nothing to eat but beans for a time.  As a result of this deprivation, she developed osteoporosis and dealt with life-long back problems.

She was educated at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Roger Institut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, and studied with Marcel Gromaire at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. 

Landscape, 1988, 24" x 48"

                                          

In 1951, spurred by a chance meeting with Morris Graves at Chartres Cathedral, Andre and her husband, painter Charles Stegeman, left post-war Europe for Canada.  They spent less than a year in the Yukon before moving to Vancouver, where Andre began teaching at the Banff School of Fine Arts, a position she would hold for 19 summers.  Deeply ambivalent about teaching, she later complained to at least one friend about what she saw as a lack of independent drive in her students.  Both she and Stegeman were educated in a time and place when art instructors were hands-off and students were left to motivate themselves and learn largely on their own.  After Banff, she taught very little.  Later, back in Belgium, she took on private students, her only source of income at the time.

In Vancouver, Andre and Stegeman’s personal and artistic relationships with Graves and fellow “mystic painter” Mark Tobey grew. In particular, according to a friend, Andre began using gold leaf in her work at this time, a technique she apparently adopted from Graves. 

Of Andre’s work at the time, Joseph Plaskett wrote, “If we feel an aura in her new work of the mythic, the mystic and the surreal, it came as much from the exoticism from the newly discovered natural world as from influences from Graves and Mark Tobey.  It was born out of a fusion of regional content with Abstract Expressionist manner.  Her contribution was truly personal.  Unlike most of the others, she never abandoned the figure . . . An undercurrent of subdued passion sets her work off from the mandarin refinement of Graves or the virtuosity of Tobey.”

In his article “Art in the Fifties: Design, Leisure, and Painting in the Age of Anxiety,” Scott Watson writes, “Both Stegeman and Andre practiced a kind of surrealism which allies their work to animistic painters.  However, their roots were in European surrealism.  As a result their work often has an intoxicating richness that made it seem overwrought at the time.”

In 1963, the couple moved to Chicago, where Stegeman had received a job with the Art Institute.  In Chicago, both artists showed at the Vincent Price Gallery and counted Irving Petlin, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero as friends.

Six years later, they moved again, this time to Haverford, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, where Stegeman became a founding member of the Department of Fine Arts at Haverford College.


Andre remained in Haverford until 1976, when her marriage ended.  After 25 years in the United States, she finally moved back to Europe—to Brussels, although for the rest of her life, she would travel between Brussels and Philadelphia, where she maintained a studio in a 200-year-old stone building in the Manayunk section of the city.

Guardien, 1985 (detail)

“Art never leaves me, even on holiday.  It is a world that is my framework, which is therefore always the real support.  But I don’t “need” to paint.  It is far more than I need, since it is ONESELF.  It is not a part of me, it is me.”  (Francoise Andre, in a 2006 letter to Sophie Orloff, translated from the French)

“Francoise Andre revives a conception of art that has been a long time in eclipse, the ideal of creating a masterpiece . . . The idea of a painting being a controlled projection of all that the artist has mastered, the culmination of a lifetime of learning and experience, has become strange to us, but it is a view that Andre demonstrates, and she has taken risks to do so.  In that sense alone her work is heroic.  It goes against the grain of contemporary mental attitudes.”  (Joseph Plaskett, “Francoise Andre,” 1985)

Portrait of Jack Coleman, 1975, 30" x 40"

                                         

Andre’s preferred subjects were, in her words, “man and the earth”: heads and figures, including many self-portraits, and strange, lonely and mystical landscapes.  Her canvases were often large, and their intense colors—scarlet, turquoise, gold—were frequently juxtaposed with the sensitive and beautiful lines of an artist who could really draw.

Often categorized as surrealist, Andre’s work was informed and inspired by art of the distant past: early Flemish painting, Byzantium, Raphael, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Ingres, and Delacroix.

All this is obvious in the paintings themselves and in her writings about her own work and life.  Through both, she revealed her complex personality, her sharp intellectual focus, and her unwavering commitment to art. 

“The arts escape everything that is tangible and to survive they must have total freedom.  In the meantime, we are floating just above the horizon line and the world tries to find a new direction.  In all this, the quest for an interior space, which is at the heart of what art is about, has disappeared as well, because art is not a mere decoration to a man’s life, but the search for an invisible facet, hidden in all of us, to which we must devote our life.  This is why it’s a “feat” to be conscious of this state as an artist, and to be able to keep on going towards this invisible goal, knowing full well that you are going against the tide—but knowing also that there is no other way to go—we have no choice.”  (Francoise Andre, 1993, translated from the French)

Francoise Andre died on December 4^th, 2009, in a nursing home in Paoli, Pennsylvania.  She was 83.

“Facing the world’s true problems, everything is put in perspective.  One must now fight against the inhuman and one of the means, short of physical strength, is to use other faculties.  Painting may appear to be a wretchedly poor force, but it may be one nevertheless.  Not a political force, but a force of communication.”  (Francoise Andre, 1993, translated from the French)         

Humain Trop Humain,  1992, 2 x 2.35 m

                                         
See more photos of Andre's work on our Flickr page.                                                                                              

See also:

One Minute with Francoise Andre


More of Andre's paintings, writing, and other material can be found on her friend Frederic Hage's website.

Nauplius, 1993, 1.2 x 1.3 m

                                        

De l'Amour, 1990, 1.2 x 1.5 m

Photo of Francoise is from artistfrancoiseandre.com.

Landscape, 1988, is owned by the Joseph P. Melvin Company in Wayne, PA, and was photographed by Richard Anderson.  Thanks to both and to Christopher Cairns for orchestrating.

All other photos of work are from the 1994 catalogue Francoise Andre. 

Thanks also to Hilarie Johnston for her insights and assistance.

Sources:

Donohoe, Victoria. “Breadth of vision evident in works of Franco-Belgian artist.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 11, 2003.

Exhibition Catalog: Francoise Andre, Brussels: BP Gallery, 1986.

Exhibition Catalog: Francoise Andre, 1994, including “Faces, Landscapes” by Jean-Louis Ferrier, “Ode to a New Humanism” by Sophie Orloff, and “Francoise Andre” by Joseph Plaskett.

“Francoise Andre” (from www.haverford.edu)

Watson, Scott. “Art in the Fifties: Design, Leisure, and Painting in the Age of Anxiety.”  Vancouver Art and Artists: 1931-1983.

www.artistfrancoiseandre.com

Zemens, Joyce.  “Francoise Andre at the Gallery Moos, Toronto.” Canadian Art, #83, January/February 1963.

Tete et Corps, 1990-91, 1.5 x 1.1 m

                                          

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.