Artists' little helpers: thoughts on apprenticeship
>> Thursday, December 08, 2011 –
apprentice,
Barnes Foundation,
Judd,
Matisse,
paintings
Donald Judd, Untitled (for Susan Buckwalter), galvanized and aluminum.
(I'd be very interested in any comments on these thoughts...)
It has been a tradition of artists for centuries now,
particularly Western artists, to have numerous assistants (in earlier parlance,
apprentices). In exchange for experience, remuneration and perhaps some cachet,
they work for these well-established artists, doing menial and preparatory
tasks: canvas preparation, paint mixing, layout drawing or painting,
fabrication, and so on. In the modern era (1890s until about 1990s), this
relationship morphed more into the assistant category than apprentice: though
many of the assistants undoubtedly went on (and still do) to further their own
careers through connections they made, or references found through their
“masters”, it wasn’t necessarily as much a given as it would have been under
the earlier definition of “apprentice”. There the younger artists were part of
a more rigid and established pattern of master and trainee, not unlike the
trade guilds of medieval Europe, and likely were more subject to the system’s
parameters, not to their own desires or whims as to when hanging out their own
shingle was finally possible: following the system was mandatory to be accepted
as a serious artist in the market (then largely ecclesiastical).
Here are two interesting aberrations of the general modernist
model, which might be worth investigating in light of the older model of
apprentice: Henri Matisse and Donald Judd.
Matisse, in La Danse,
his canvas-cum-mural commissioned in the early 1920s by Dr. Barnes of
Pennsylvania, was already laying the groundwork for his famous, late-career
cut-paper works. The nearly forty-foot long mural incorporates large areas of
color, depicting frolicking grey female figures against a backdrop of pink,
blue and black. Spending time with the mural it becomes obvious that, along each
edge of the positive shapes, there seems to be a painted, undulating band or
border, in a slightly different value and sheen than that of the larger field
of color, that visually readjusts, balances and cleans up the edges of those
shapes. There are also similar bands along the inside of the negative shapes.
This toys with one’s perception of the negatives and positives: they seemingly
float upon each other, like paper on a puddle, soaking in water at intervals,
creating a set of complex, nuanced and mutable planes. Beyond simple
description, however, this quality points to one of the many interesting
anecdotes about this work: that Matisse hired a house-painter, presumably in
Nice, where the studio for painting La Danse was situated, to paint in the very
large areas of solid color. Matisse afterwards then likely applied those aforementioned
“bands” which tidy-up – and edit compositional balance, as can be seen by the many
line and edge adjustments – the areas the house painter covered. Was this done
by Matisse as a time-saver; was he perhaps running past schedule? Or did he
simply not feel the need to individually and directly apply every drop of paint
onto a mural which would carry his name? This is not a very Modernist concept;
modern expression at its height was so much about the individual’s expression,
created by that very same individual; it wasn’t until more postmodern times
when the direct creation of work and manipulation of material as an unbroken
line from the individual’s idea was questioned, and became somewhat
unnecessary, immaterial or even pejorative (such as in Donald Judd, who we’ll
discuss next). Could this gesture of using a workman’s hand in a fine art
application be of the same seminal token as much of Matisse’s artistic
decisions? Or was it simply out of necessity…or both? And more importantly,
could that humble (station; we don’t know his personality) house painter be
considered the missing link between the ancient idea of “apprentice”, and the
postmodern idea of the “hired tradesperson”, such as Judd and others used?
Donald Judd was a postmodernist artist of what is sometimes
called the Minimalist school, and that title has much to do with our questions
of “individuality” and “authorship” of an artwork. Minimalists became known for
actively and deliberately divorcing the material creation of their work from
the concept or idea. This would often take the form of farming out the
fabrication of their sculpture and materials to workmen and craftspeople of the
common variety: for Judd, this sometimes meant HVAC contractors, metalworkers
and carpenters, who would fabricate his work for him according to his
specifications and drawings. Artists have been doing this, of a sort, for
generations, in the form of having other more specifically-trained artisans,
such as bronze casters or lithographers, carry part of a project to completion
that the author/artist was not well-versed in (or not interested in). That is
not exactly what we speak of here: this is different in that it is (a) using
skilled workers, but from outside the art “world”, and (b) using labor which is
not personally invested in finding their own way, and making a name in the same
milieu as the hiring or “master” artist. This is the major reason why Matisse’s
use of a house painter to apply the actual paint surface of a painting is so
interesting; a completely ancient and a completely postmodern gesture, all at
once.
A good example of a Judd work that was fabricated by skilled
tradesmen is one of his wall pieces of galvanized steel: not surprisingly, the
same material used to make HVAC ductwork (the one I know personally is in a
private collection in Philadelphia). The piece is expertly made – more expertly
than perhaps Judd himself could have accomplished – but has its aberrations as
any handmade object does. Was Judd revolutionizing the idea of an “assistant”
for the postmodern era (that of an aesthetically disinterested tradesperson),
or was he simply riffing off an idea begun quietly by Matisse?
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