.
The Fauve Landscape
Finding My Way in LA
I knew the new publisher in Philadelphia was lying. Cap Cities ABC had shuffled its properties, moving Energy User News from Fairchild Publications in New York to Chilton in Radn
or out on the Philly Mainline. My new boss said I could stay on editing EUN in the little New York office with what remained of the New York staff, but I would have to learn how to golf.
Yes, it was “Countdown to Unemployment.” Knowing this, I traveled West to Los Angeles to attend “Lighting World,” an ill-conceived trade show that tried to appeal to artists, stage designers, airport architects and industrial plant engineers at the same time. Witnessing that event, in sunny California back in 1990, I promised myself I would never have a gray ponytail.
My travel plans entailed a day off in Los Angeles with no car. I had a moderate interest in going to art museums while traveling, and I figured that would be a good way to spend the day in a city that simply isn’t se
t up for walking. It is, in fact, a very tough city to navigate, even for cab drivers. On Saturday morning, I hopped in a cab and gave the driver the address of the Museum of Contemporary Art–that sounded like a good museum to visit. I had to sit up front with him with a map to help him find it. This is very Los Angeles experience.
All I can remember seeing at the contemporary art museum was a pile of rope on the floor. This was supposed to be an exhibit. I sat down, opened up a “What’s Up this Weekend” brochure I got at the hotel, and noticed that at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was something called “The Fauve Landscape.” I had no idea what a Fauve was. The brochure listed members of a group of painters called Fauves—I’d never heard of Georges Braques, Albert Marquet, Maurice de Vlaminck, or Andre Derain. But I had heard of Henri Matisse. I found another cab somehow.
By the time I arrived at LACMA, it was mid afternoon. I walked around the museum a bit, and noticed that there was a one-painting special exhibit featuring Soap Bubbles by a French painter named Jean Siméon Chardin, whom I had never heard of. The exhibit 
included the one painting and several preliminary sketches. I walked outside the main museum to a courtyard and found the Fauve exhibit in a separate building or wing. It was sundown. A big speaker system was playing the sound track to a television program that had recently debuted—Twin Peaks. I loved the show and the music, which was written by Angelo Badalamenti. I sat in the courtyard and listened for a while. Then I poked my head into the Fauve gallery. And my life changed forever.
Sounds ridiculous, but it is true. I was dazzled by the most wonderful exhibit of…anything that I’d ever seen. My immediate thought was—Jesus, it’s like a small army of Vincent Van Goghs put this thing together. An explosion of color and wild forms in recognizable landscapes. Harbors, cities, boats, buildings, slap-dash figures and wild clouds. I then thought of paintings my friend Paul Weingarten had exhibited, how exciting I thought they were when I saw them hanging in a chapel at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NY
C. I actually had to leave the Fauve exhibit and go back into the LACMA courtyard to clear my head and think about what I was about to do. I listened to the Badalamenti music, vibey, vampy jazz with a walking bass, and felt a great welling of excitement—a physical surge that I can still feel thinking about it. It was getting dark when I went back inside.
Walking back into that flaming room from the cool September darkness was like an ascent into a world that was perfectly mine and all new. A time-stopped Nirvana. I can still visualize the space, it’s lighting, and the general sense I got from the paintings.
The first painters I picked up on were by Derain and Vlaminck. I read about their legendary meeting on a broke-down train in the French country side, their walk back to the city, and their agreement to go out and paint together, which they did. The Fauves all worked in the plein air tradition of the Barbizon and Impressionist painters. Their work is about immediacy and color. They took Van Gogh and pushed what he was doing further into what would emerge as Modern Art, a break from Post Impressionism. There is a naivety to their work that 
is quite deceptive. Once I began painting I realized that they worked with a precision in their use of color that transcended mere technique. Their experience in contact with nature was simply a profound compelling force that they were able to capture. There was very little precedent, in fact, other than Van Gogh, for the personal exertion in their art. What they came up with was so startling that they were dubbed by an art critic “wild beasts” or “fauves.” The intentionally derisive label stuck for this fairly loose grouping of artists—they indulged in nothing like the kind of manifestoes issues by their brethren in Germany, Die Brücke. Among the Fauves were Picasso and George Rouault, who went on to pursue very distinctive styles and create their own space.
At the center of the group, I found Matisse, whose work, once I passed through the Derain/Vlaminck gallery, ran through the rest of the show. There were many paintings of the south of France–notably The Window–and of Paris. The sam
e for Albert Marquet, Raul Duffy, and Georges Braque. Braque went on to forge cubism with Picasso.
The Fauve period lasted only a few years. The group dispersed, and everyone went in a different direction. Vlaminck actually settled into a darker pallet, similar to Van Gogh’s before the latter went to France. I saw a post-Fauve Vlaminck in a gallery window in Manhattan years later—potatoes and a clay mug–that I thought was a very early Van Gogh. But Vlaminck was without a doubt moving forward. Derain, unfortunately, chose to pursue a hokey kind of neoclassicism in later years. His Fauve work, among the best of the group, stands as his great work. For Matisse, Braque, and others, the Fauve period produced their first great work. Much more followed.
Art, especially in New York, has, for years now, been all about “shocking” with “the new.” Everybody is a rebel. It makes the New York art world impossible to navigate, given the amount of self-indulgent crap that is produced and displayed. The Fauves, however, were real revolu
tionaries. They were wuch interesting figures. In many ways, Valaminck is the most colorful—a tall and stout bike racer, musician, and chess player. There are wonderful photographs of him smoking a pipe with an outsized Stetson. Derain painted him in exactly that prospect.
I stood before all this work and felt an enormous compulsion to paint. It was an idea I’d toyed with over the years, but always considered beyond my capability. Up until that time, I had played bass in a rock ‘n’ roll band and written poetry. More recently, I’d done a lot of woodwork in the basement of the little house Maureen and I bought in Maplewood, New Jersey, the year after we were married. I was always doing something creative and artisitc, but I never really dug in. That was about to change.
I closed the museum that evening, bought the catalog, and went back to the hotel. I remember sitting at the bar that night with the catalog, starting my self education in art history—a course I continued at home and on trains for ten years. When I got back to my office in New York, two blocks from Utrecht Art Supplies in Greenwich Village, I bought a sack of paint. I bought a couple of books on how to do it, and I invited some artist friends over to paint with me. Then, thank God, the Philadelphia publisher made his move.
I was out of work from March (when the Fauve Landscape show traveled to New York!–I went again with Weingarten) to September, 1991, with a severance arrangement 
that lasted exactly that long. I spent a lot of time, and arguably a shameful amount of money given the circumstances, painting. In an act of unspeakable bravado, I signed up for a week of copying, in oil paint, in the impressionist gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I copied a painting of barges by Pissarro. I was in way over my head, but one of the guards was really interested in what I came up with. Before long, I had a new job, this time on 57th Street in Manhattan, across the street from the Art Student’s League of New York. There I took Thursday night courses with Ernest Crichlow, a Harlem Renaissance painter, and Hananiah Harari, a brilliant American painter who went to France after World War I and actually took over Chaim Soutine’s studio in Cagnes. I sold my first painting, in 1994, to my new, New York, publisher.
Some closing notes:
~I now have a relatively acute interest in visiting art museums. My day job gives me an opportunity to do so pretty much all over the U.S. and Europe, which is just great.
~I also now know a lot about all the artists mentioned above, and many others. People I met on the train during my commuting days would tell me they assumed I 
was an art professor because I always had an outsized art book on my lap. I once had to undergo physical therapy for an injury incurred from carrying large paintings–as large as 48″ by 36″–on trains and subways during rush hour.
~I’ve painted and exhibited with my mentor. It’s incredible that I knew one of the best painters working anywhere before I even knew he painted.
~Painting plays a lead role in a complicated life that will always include a day job. When I don’t paint for a long period of time, it effects my behavior. I think the doctors call it depression. Painting is kind of like my drug. More accurately, it’s how I meditate. Or how I pray–I’ve become a much more religious person through painting. That’s a difficult one to explain. I only really express it in pictures.
Vanx
_________
The paintings
Derain: Landscape at L’Estaque
Vlaminck: Houses at Chatou
Braques: Port at La Ciotat
Marquet: Pont Neuf, Paris
Derain: Houses of Parliament, London
Vlaminck: Boats on the Seine
Matisse: The Window
Braques: View of L’Estaque
_________
Mullin: Grover Cleveland Park, Caldwell
Happy 40th anniversary to LACMA!
Here is the short film that PhRMA, the Big Pharma trade association, does not want you to see—because it beats anything on the shelf or in the pipeline at any of its member companies:
Todd and Alice slipped through the Garden State recently on their way to points North. They contributed to the Grand American Road Trip Songbook with this short film about the Homestate. There is veritas footage of the Garden State Parkway, and Sopranos fans will recognize the pizza place. Lots of other Weird New Jerseyana and a very cute dog. The sound track warms up the exquisite Dylan/McGuinn grudge match from That Real Seventies Show.
.0.jpg)
