December 2007
(This paper is the new edition, revised, enlarged and corrected, one of my text which appeared in issue 22 of the magazine Cahiers d'Art the Sept.-Oct. 1997. The magazine was dedicated in that number a large bathroom with Michael Goldberg)
the first time I met Michael Goldberg in 1979 in Paris during a muggy morning in late July. He brought with him, including cards and small paintings, some thirty works including some we had to choose to use his show to me. I had already made a pre-selected by the slide that had sent me a couple of months ago and we agreed to meet the parties to the Bastille in the study lent for the occasion by his friend scultore.Quasi all Codex work belonged to the series that started in those years and for which there are still many large paintings, which I facilitated in organizing the exhibition. After the initial pleasantries, he scattered the works on the floor in random order and so we began to select works to be exhibited, apparently by mutual agreement, but felt like he did not make a big difference to choose one or another, were basically all " its work. " Even if it did not react in any way trying to give an explanation (a "read-educated" in key aesthetic and cultural-philosophical) works that I chose, merely nodded, seemed waiting to find out what the real feeling that I had with her work. In fact was excited and finally began to talk on a land more friendly when I revealed that I chose this job because I really liked the way "that yellow stripe ended up there to get stuck in the middle between the large blue spot and the dense red brush beside him. " Eventually the ice had melted and Mike decided to open the bottle of Chablis that was waiting nearby in the bucket. And we toasted to the success of the show and the beginning of our amicizia.Quella of Codex was a series that, even in the slides, I liked a lot because on the surface of each work is structured, approaching or in opposition to each other freely, abstract forms and fields of various types and color held together, bonded and interacted by the presence of colored bars or stripes and streaks and subtle color shifts which mark the boundaries between different forms and movements, worked at the same time a scaffold or carrier at all. A set of precarious balance and continue to get a picture of contrasts precise and solid unit. Or even all that could be completely overturned. These jobs were now completely different, but for some details, still recalled to mind the series of paintings that he painted between 1960 and 1963 and defined by Klaus Kertess, "Architecting Paint." This was the first but fundamental "fascination" accepted that the painting of that day Mike and I constantly found later in all his works or series of works that followed over the years futuri.Infatti, even today, what fascinates me is his painting of that collection of shapes and colors apparently put into disorder, but self-forming unit, and also intrigues me that strange feeling of being able to overturn labyrinthine and change continuously angle lettura.A I think the painting in his paintings never tries to cause effects on the retina of ' observer or even less rational brain reactions on the content of a work of art that, as he says (paraphrasing Adorno in his own way), 'It will not be ever the sum of the intellect that is pumped in to determine the content of a framework ", (1), but creeps nonchalantly in the deep layers of our emotions, forcing us to face-to-compare the different feelings of order and / or chaos, balance or imbalance that we receive from the panel urging our personal and work life listening attitude and willingness to be intimate more or less involved with essa.Quel day, to my surprise, he insisted it needed to take very , to be included in the exhibition, even two or three jobs a few years back and very different from the contemporary world and which sprang from the set of Codex. Previous work seemed more "Experimental" means the surface of raw paper, hardly painted, was tortured, raped by strappetto, abrasions and burns caused by holes as cigarette butts, all mixed with a light color, diluted, and transparent watercolor, as "slave ". I just could not grasp its continuity, back down in the Codex. It was only a few months later, in the works mounted on the wall of the exhibition that I realized why Mike had wanted to include those older workers: all the actions he carried out on the paper were concentrated in a shape that vaguely resembled a bow, once architectural form of imperfect semicircle, or (as instinctively guessed, being Tuscan) from the familiar, vague, this is another form collinare.E constant aspect that concerns his painting at that moment I did not consider enough, but it has resurfaced and I found it confirmed even more recently, after I saw the paintings created during a business trip in his house in the hills of Siena in the years between 1982 and 1990.Avevo have seen reproductions of his works in a catalog of 1959 (2) on American painting and to be a painter from the beginning action painting that operated in the magic of the New York art scene of the 50s, belongs to the generation of a few years younger than the "heroic" of Pollock, Gorky, de Kooning, Rothko and F. Kline, and then from the country in which you praised, both in painting and art, the sublime and minimalism, I did not expect so as to produce a completely different painting styles from New York where we used to see here, in Europe, to the mid-70s. View in landscape painting that was then at that time Michael Goldberg seemed transformed, transfigured. Meanwhile it had become very "outdated" (the mere fact of "painting" was considered outdated in those years - although many continued to do so in the silence of their studies), certainly "unusual", not because of the contrast between feelings of balance and disequilibrium, or for that ghostly landscape, I continued (and continues) to "feel", but why, attended more closely and carefully observed, we could see in this painting that something had happened during his becoming, it felt like painting a typically time crisis: stripped, dense, doughy and full of tension at the same time. It deliberately "insolent." Painting that made a palpable uneasiness, as if this was still a painful memory, the set was thus created an atmosphere in which music would be called blues, and it was precisely this aspect that struck me oddly in his painting and his paintings. Perhaps because it was all just the opposite of nice, abstract, striking American Painting of the Color Fields, then highly fashionable and prevailing because naively believed to be the natural heir, the continuation of Abstract Expressionism. And nothing to do with even the ascetic, dry, mental minimal painting of Fundamental Painting (3) as Ryman and Frank Stella. (Even Stella, after leaving the minimal and geometric paintings with which he had become famous, would come only at the end of the seventies to research other similar relief in his paintings painted metal). Perhaps the unease that despite all transpired from strokes was based on his memories, the memory of the facts of personal history or probably on nostalgia for an era now past and how it was nice to be able to live, In those early fifties, through the adventure of painting. In that magical moment and stirring the kind of "Eldorado" to someone who had aligned with the rules, had yielded fame and commercial success while others, in a few years, things had changed and found themselves expelled from ' Eden. (Sample is in this sense, the succession of ups and downs, both critics of the market, the painting by Philip Guston.) But probably the uncomfortable also come from determination to continue painting "in his own way" and in spite of everything that was happening around, looking with determination and persistence to express only one painting all "his". In paintings by painters at that time remained in the shadows, more noticeable in those of the Americans than in Europeans, we could still distinguish, under the skin of the painting, all the scars of the "beatings" suffered during the sensational claims of international Pop Art, Minimal, Arte Povera and Conceptual Art, a collection of trends that alternated between 60 and 70 on stage, but that did not have much to do with the ideas with which these painters brought forward opere.La planning their unilateral interpretations put in place during the '70s by opinionmakers era: critics, magazines and exhibitions in museums, they had to have caused painting by Michael Goldberg, as in that of some of his generation (as in what I saw so many other painters' non-aligned ") quite a few" mutilations "and forcing them to toil all transformations, relegating them to a situation constant discomfort. Undoubtedly come with your "paint" the results of full maturity and blooms today, forced the steps were necessary for him as for others, and some obstacles along the path of a life together and still must be addressed and removed. Indeed, it seems, that it is precisely such a process, to be considered necessary, to achieve its full maturity "to do". But this is always so essential? Sooner or later in the art, including the history and the market, are entitled to the delays and errors of assessment in the past, at that time should be given to Mike what is owed. If nothing else, all due respect and consideration for the value, consistency, strength and depth with which he pursued his artistic career. Finally, in recent decades and especially in his painting recently everything seems much more relaxed, laid back, a paint almost "joyful", which musically describes itself as "lyrical." The series of pictures follow one after the other with renewed strength coloristic and expressive some have even recovered the original interest in the abstract landscape as metaphor. Asked the first time in 1980/81 by Carmengloria Morales at his home in Sermugnano to spend a summer, along with his wife Lynn Umlauf, holiday and painting, he is fond of Italy and then to Tuscany where, since 1987, stays for long periods of the year in the rustic country that has rented in the Siena hills, alternating with NYC, where he continues to teach and paint. In his new studio, working on small and large pictures is painting in which his old love for the urban landscape abstract combines and compares with the influences of Italian Renaissance painting of the Masters and Florentine Mannerism and Siena. As he himself confesses in a paper in September 1997 in Issue 22 of the Cahiers d'Art magazine: "Being the type of person that really does not appreciate nature - I'm almost allergic to - surprise me still my decision to spend five months a year buried in the Tuscan countryside. Surely I'm here for the sense of alienation, the lack of interruptions, the need to spend long periods of time with his nose deep thoughts to devote to art and life. What luxury! The classical painting is for me lifeblood. The intense faith and the virtuosity of Titian, the insane brightness of Grunewald, the honest and simple pleasures of Rubens, the eye and skilful hand of Giotto and Simone Martini, searing light of Piero Della Francesca is a drug of my choice and make on-site experience is infinitely exciting. "In these long years, our friendship has consolidated more and more and I continue to exhibit every two to three years pictures of his new series that paints here in Tuscany. The show we did recently was his tenth in Livorno in my personal galleria.Oggi, throughout this story, the thing that tickles my vanity is the idea (fantasy?) Of stealing a neglected tree that threatened to finish stifled the frenetic metropolitan traffic in Manhattan and helping him to replant the olive trees and vineyards of Chianti, where I observed its rebirth, I Having regard to thrive and flourish with wild colors more beautiful. Of course none of this has been the realization of the utopian dream of my life, nor the statement of my personal success but more shocking, given the sad times that surround us, I find that after all is just another one of the simplest recipes for useful survive and continue to enjoy the life that little bit of good that we can still weave. The same thought occurs to me in the morning for a cappuccino at the bar: with a sprinkle of powdered cocoa takes on a different flavor, no, I find that it tastes more ordinary. So he continued to paint as they please, and I continue today to look at Mike's profile and enjoy the colors of his fascinating paintings hanging on the walls of my tunnel.
And sometimes we take a glass of Chablis set.
Roberto Peccolo, November 2003
(This paper is the new edition, revised, enlarged and corrected, one of my text which appeared in issue 22 of the magazine Cahiers d'Art the Sept.-Oct. 1997. The magazine had devoted a long article in that issue with Michael Goldberg)
(1) From a conference MG 1991. Reprinted in MG, Soul / Soul Series " Painting and Memory," Morgana Edizioni, Florence 2002.
(2) Catalog " Arte Nova " Turin, 1959. Exhibition organized by M. Tapié and L. Pistoi the movement of artists in Turin (Informal European survey of artists, painters, American artists and American action painting of the Japanese Gutai Group.)
(3) Title of the exhibition "Fundamental Painting" held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1975 by R. Dippel.
(This paper is the new edition, revised, enlarged and corrected, one of my text which appeared in issue 22 of the magazine Cahiers d'Art the Sept.-Oct. 1997. The magazine was dedicated in that number a large bathroom with Michael Goldberg)
the first time I met Michael Goldberg in 1979 in Paris during a muggy morning in late July. He brought with him, including cards and small paintings, some thirty works including some we had to choose to use his show to me. I had already made a pre-selected by the slide that had sent me a couple of months ago and we agreed to meet the parties to the Bastille in the study lent for the occasion by his friend scultore.Quasi all Codex work belonged to the series that started in those years and for which there are still many large paintings, which I facilitated in organizing the exhibition. After the initial pleasantries, he scattered the works on the floor in random order and so we began to select works to be exhibited, apparently by mutual agreement, but felt like he did not make a big difference to choose one or another, were basically all " its work. " Even if it did not react in any way trying to give an explanation (a "read-educated" in key aesthetic and cultural-philosophical) works that I chose, merely nodded, seemed waiting to find out what the real feeling that I had with her work. In fact was excited and finally began to talk on a land more friendly when I revealed that I chose this job because I really liked the way "that yellow stripe ended up there to get stuck in the middle between the large blue spot and the dense red brush beside him. " Eventually the ice had melted and Mike decided to open the bottle of Chablis that was waiting nearby in the bucket. And we toasted to the success of the show and the beginning of our amicizia.Quella of Codex was a series that, even in the slides, I liked a lot because on the surface of each work is structured, approaching or in opposition to each other freely, abstract forms and fields of various types and color held together, bonded and interacted by the presence of colored bars or stripes and streaks and subtle color shifts which mark the boundaries between different forms and movements, worked at the same time a scaffold or carrier at all. A set of precarious balance and continue to get a picture of contrasts precise and solid unit. Or even all that could be completely overturned. These jobs were now completely different, but for some details, still recalled to mind the series of paintings that he painted between 1960 and 1963 and defined by Klaus Kertess, "Architecting Paint." This was the first but fundamental "fascination" accepted that the painting of that day Mike and I constantly found later in all his works or series of works that followed over the years futuri.Infatti, even today, what fascinates me is his painting of that collection of shapes and colors apparently put into disorder, but self-forming unit, and also intrigues me that strange feeling of being able to overturn labyrinthine and change continuously angle lettura.A I think the painting in his paintings never tries to cause effects on the retina of ' observer or even less rational brain reactions on the content of a work of art that, as he says (paraphrasing Adorno in his own way), 'It will not be ever the sum of the intellect that is pumped in to determine the content of a framework ", (1), but creeps nonchalantly in the deep layers of our emotions, forcing us to face-to-compare the different feelings of order and / or chaos, balance or imbalance that we receive from the panel urging our personal and work life listening attitude and willingness to be intimate more or less involved with essa.Quel day, to my surprise, he insisted it needed to take very , to be included in the exhibition, even two or three jobs a few years back and very different from the contemporary world and which sprang from the set of Codex. Previous work seemed more "Experimental" means the surface of raw paper, hardly painted, was tortured, raped by strappetto, abrasions and burns caused by holes as cigarette butts, all mixed with a light color, diluted, and transparent watercolor, as "slave ". I just could not grasp its continuity, back down in the Codex. It was only a few months later, in the works mounted on the wall of the exhibition that I realized why Mike had wanted to include those older workers: all the actions he carried out on the paper were concentrated in a shape that vaguely resembled a bow, once architectural form of imperfect semicircle, or (as instinctively guessed, being Tuscan) from the familiar, vague, this is another form collinare.E constant aspect that concerns his painting at that moment I did not consider enough, but it has resurfaced and I found it confirmed even more recently, after I saw the paintings created during a business trip in his house in the hills of Siena in the years between 1982 and 1990.Avevo have seen reproductions of his works in a catalog of 1959 (2) on American painting and to be a painter from the beginning action painting that operated in the magic of the New York art scene of the 50s, belongs to the generation of a few years younger than the "heroic" of Pollock, Gorky, de Kooning, Rothko and F. Kline, and then from the country in which you praised, both in painting and art, the sublime and minimalism, I did not expect so as to produce a completely different painting styles from New York where we used to see here, in Europe, to the mid-70s. View in landscape painting that was then at that time Michael Goldberg seemed transformed, transfigured. Meanwhile it had become very "outdated" (the mere fact of "painting" was considered outdated in those years - although many continued to do so in the silence of their studies), certainly "unusual", not because of the contrast between feelings of balance and disequilibrium, or for that ghostly landscape, I continued (and continues) to "feel", but why, attended more closely and carefully observed, we could see in this painting that something had happened during his becoming, it felt like painting a typically time crisis: stripped, dense, doughy and full of tension at the same time. It deliberately "insolent." Painting that made a palpable uneasiness, as if this was still a painful memory, the set was thus created an atmosphere in which music would be called blues, and it was precisely this aspect that struck me oddly in his painting and his paintings. Perhaps because it was all just the opposite of nice, abstract, striking American Painting of the Color Fields, then highly fashionable and prevailing because naively believed to be the natural heir, the continuation of Abstract Expressionism. And nothing to do with even the ascetic, dry, mental minimal painting of Fundamental Painting (3) as Ryman and Frank Stella. (Even Stella, after leaving the minimal and geometric paintings with which he had become famous, would come only at the end of the seventies to research other similar relief in his paintings painted metal). Perhaps the unease that despite all transpired from strokes was based on his memories, the memory of the facts of personal history or probably on nostalgia for an era now past and how it was nice to be able to live, In those early fifties, through the adventure of painting. In that magical moment and stirring the kind of "Eldorado" to someone who had aligned with the rules, had yielded fame and commercial success while others, in a few years, things had changed and found themselves expelled from ' Eden. (Sample is in this sense, the succession of ups and downs, both critics of the market, the painting by Philip Guston.) But probably the uncomfortable also come from determination to continue painting "in his own way" and in spite of everything that was happening around, looking with determination and persistence to express only one painting all "his". In paintings by painters at that time remained in the shadows, more noticeable in those of the Americans than in Europeans, we could still distinguish, under the skin of the painting, all the scars of the "beatings" suffered during the sensational claims of international Pop Art, Minimal, Arte Povera and Conceptual Art, a collection of trends that alternated between 60 and 70 on stage, but that did not have much to do with the ideas with which these painters brought forward opere.La planning their unilateral interpretations put in place during the '70s by opinionmakers era: critics, magazines and exhibitions in museums, they had to have caused painting by Michael Goldberg, as in that of some of his generation (as in what I saw so many other painters' non-aligned ") quite a few" mutilations "and forcing them to toil all transformations, relegating them to a situation constant discomfort. Undoubtedly come with your "paint" the results of full maturity and blooms today, forced the steps were necessary for him as for others, and some obstacles along the path of a life together and still must be addressed and removed. Indeed, it seems, that it is precisely such a process, to be considered necessary, to achieve its full maturity "to do". But this is always so essential? Sooner or later in the art, including the history and the market, are entitled to the delays and errors of assessment in the past, at that time should be given to Mike what is owed. If nothing else, all due respect and consideration for the value, consistency, strength and depth with which he pursued his artistic career. Finally, in recent decades and especially in his painting recently everything seems much more relaxed, laid back, a paint almost "joyful", which musically describes itself as "lyrical." The series of pictures follow one after the other with renewed strength coloristic and expressive some have even recovered the original interest in the abstract landscape as metaphor. Asked the first time in 1980/81 by Carmengloria Morales at his home in Sermugnano to spend a summer, along with his wife Lynn Umlauf, holiday and painting, he is fond of Italy and then to Tuscany where, since 1987, stays for long periods of the year in the rustic country that has rented in the Siena hills, alternating with NYC, where he continues to teach and paint. In his new studio, working on small and large pictures is painting in which his old love for the urban landscape abstract combines and compares with the influences of Italian Renaissance painting of the Masters and Florentine Mannerism and Siena. As he himself confesses in a paper in September 1997 in Issue 22 of the Cahiers d'Art magazine: "Being the type of person that really does not appreciate nature - I'm almost allergic to - surprise me still my decision to spend five months a year buried in the Tuscan countryside. Surely I'm here for the sense of alienation, the lack of interruptions, the need to spend long periods of time with his nose deep thoughts to devote to art and life. What luxury! The classical painting is for me lifeblood. The intense faith and the virtuosity of Titian, the insane brightness of Grunewald, the honest and simple pleasures of Rubens, the eye and skilful hand of Giotto and Simone Martini, searing light of Piero Della Francesca is a drug of my choice and make on-site experience is infinitely exciting. "In these long years, our friendship has consolidated more and more and I continue to exhibit every two to three years pictures of his new series that paints here in Tuscany. The show we did recently was his tenth in Livorno in my personal galleria.Oggi, throughout this story, the thing that tickles my vanity is the idea (fantasy?) Of stealing a neglected tree that threatened to finish stifled the frenetic metropolitan traffic in Manhattan and helping him to replant the olive trees and vineyards of Chianti, where I observed its rebirth, I Having regard to thrive and flourish with wild colors more beautiful. Of course none of this has been the realization of the utopian dream of my life, nor the statement of my personal success but more shocking, given the sad times that surround us, I find that after all is just another one of the simplest recipes for useful survive and continue to enjoy the life that little bit of good that we can still weave. The same thought occurs to me in the morning for a cappuccino at the bar: with a sprinkle of powdered cocoa takes on a different flavor, no, I find that it tastes more ordinary. So he continued to paint as they please, and I continue today to look at Mike's profile and enjoy the colors of his fascinating paintings hanging on the walls of my tunnel.
And sometimes we take a glass of Chablis set.
Roberto Peccolo, November 2003
(This paper is the new edition, revised, enlarged and corrected, one of my text which appeared in issue 22 of the magazine Cahiers d'Art the Sept.-Oct. 1997. The magazine had devoted a long article in that issue with Michael Goldberg)
(1) From a conference MG 1991. Reprinted in MG, Soul / Soul Series " Painting and Memory," Morgana Edizioni, Florence 2002.
(2) Catalog " Arte Nova " Turin, 1959. Exhibition organized by M. Tapié and L. Pistoi the movement of artists in Turin (Informal European survey of artists, painters, American artists and American action painting of the Japanese Gutai Group.)
(3) Title of the exhibition "Fundamental Painting" held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1975 by R. Dippel.
0 comments:
Post a Comment