NEW and OLD FASHIONED ABSTRACT PAINTINGS ARE A HEALING THING.
Ronnie Landfield's Introduction.

These are critical times. I've seen the best artists of my generation decimated by censorship and suppression. They have been misunderstood, ignored, treated with willful ignorance and disdain. The spiritual revelations that burn in these great works of art are yet to be recovered; they echo in the soul, and, like the works of William Blake, will transcend time.

High aesthetics, my aesthetics, and your aesthetics. There is no prescription for quality. In the long run each of us creates our aesthetic vision, hoping to achieve a consensus. We don't need to see every Franz Kline to understand the position Franz Kline took. And as we create works of art, each of us takes positions. Sometimes we spend our lifetimes making our positions clear; sometimes we are known only by a single work.

The 20th Century gave us abstract art, among other things. But the definition of abstraction changes as our ideas about art change. There are two mainstreams of Twentieth-Century art: the Duchampian mainstream – Apollonian, intellectual, conceptual, and ironic. Perhaps more interesting is the Matissean mainstream – Dionysian, intelligent, romantic, and passionate – which strives for freedom of expression via hands-on use of materials.

The artist can be seen as metaphysician, as alchemist capable of transforming and transcending materials and objects. Artists endow material with magical powers and properties that transform matter into art and into a valuable spiritual commodity. This is the nature of and challenge inherent in making art.

The Abstract Expressionists –Gorky, Rothko, Motherwell, Newman, Kline, Hofmann, De Kooning, and especially Pollock – created an ocean of images and ideas; a visual mythology from which springs the abstract art of today.

The Colorfield painters and Minimalists, like Noland, Kelly, Reinhardt, Judd, Ryman and Agnes Martin, are aesthetic artists; but it is Lyrical Abstraction, as practiced first by Morris Louis and later by Larry Poons, Frank Stella, Ronald Davis, Dan Christensen, John Griefen, William Pettet, Ronnie Landfield and many others that defines the possibilities for High Aesthetics in abstract painting today.

The art the of this century has sometimes been characterized as "hot" and "cool." It seems abstract artists are divided, deeply divided, not only about matters hot or cool. We are divided about abstraction and about imagery, and we have developed cults -- cults of the traditional, cults of the new, cults of the found object, cults of the computer. These divisions prevent us from appreciating the beauty and inner peace that comes from great art.

"I like making art. I like pouring paint from buckets. I like color, I'm sensitive to surfaces. Feeling my senses that I cannot name, except to say -- thats my aesthetic sense. Moving the stuff with long sqeegees and big brushes. Using rollers through cadmium orange, hansa yellow, dioxine purple and pthalo green. Hitting an area, pulling it off, like a coup, or committing a crime, and who said artists don't take chances. Gazing for hours at the surface of a painting wondering how can I nail it?"

Abstraction is about faith, about suspension of disbelief; it's about the unknown, and making visible the invisible. It isn't the imagery, but the cynicism that is disturbing. Duchamp, Dada, Johns,Warhol, Pop, Conceptual Art – however ironic – make me wonder at the cynical loss of faith that fuels the popularity of those movements. Painting is visual; one must look at it and see it with one's eyes. It's hard to talk about, because it isn't about propaganda; it's just clear. Do we believe what we see? Or do we only see what we believe?

From the The Fauves – who took the cue from Post-Impressionism, using color that abstracted nature – to the Cubists like Braque and Picasso – who changed our perception of representation – the concept of abstraction has changed. Picasso, inspired by Cezanne and by African and Egyptian Art, was in his time thought of as an abstract painter. However, Picasso never let go of imagery, no matter how many liberties he took in changing the way things look. And the Russian mystical painters Malevich and Rodchenko – variously inspired by Modernism, Theosophy, Mme. Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, and Ouspensky – created probably what is the purest abstract art.

Rather than attempting to cover the whole history of modern art, perhaps the following three anecdotes will give a flavor of what's at stake here:

(1) Alchemy

I remember a morning in April1966. I was nineteen years old, wearing my only Brooks Brothers suit, on the way from my 6th floor walk-up apartment in the East Village to an appointment to see the famous architect Philip Johnson, whose office I would find at the top floor of the Seagrams Building, the pinnacle of Modernist Architecture of the time. I was scared, slightly in awe of my surroundings. The receptionist -- who struck me as someone straight out of The Fountainhead –sat me down at a long empty table in the board room to wait for Mr. Johnson. As I looked out at the magnificent view through the glass windows on all sides, the whole of Manhattan, clear to the East River, could be seen. As I waited there, out of the corner of my eye I spotted something shiny on the table, something that reminded me of aluminum foil. As I looked closely I saw several tiny figures of men in a row apparently walking along on a low wooden base. I was stunned to realize that the Giacometti I was looking at was made of aluminum foil. In Giacometti's hands the stuff my mother wrapped turkeys in was turned into a powerful and succinct work of art.

(2) High Aesthetics

In 1976 I saw an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called The Wild Beasts: Fauvism and its Affinities, or something like that. I'd been around more than ten years; I had more than a dozen one-man shows. I was represented by the Andre Emmerich Gallery and I saw the show, never thinking I'd learn something that would stay with me for a lifetime. But there were two small landscape paintings side by side that caught my eye as I moved through the show. I looked very hard at them both. They were about the same size, dated the same year, and they looked to be the same locale, so maybe they were made the same day. The Vlaminck on the left was very good, emotional, felt, colorful; and as I looked, I began to feel how the artist was feeling about the rent, perhaps about his wife. It was very expressive. The Matisse on the right was a better painting. It was in perfect balance, clear and harmonious. I was stunned to realize that as I gazed at it, I had learned more about the pure concentration of the art of painting than I had ever known. Matisse expressed through color, drawing, and surface what great painting was. No thoughts of rent here, only aesthetics, high aesthetics. The small Matisse painting with its dense concentration was spontaneous and precise and made me high.

(3) Power of Beauty

"NEW FASHIONED ABSTRACT PAINTINGS ARE A HEALING THING."