Painting by Helen Frankenthaler
"Adriatic"
1968

Just a week after the East Austin Studio Tour ended (my last big art event for the year), we took another vacation out to LA to visit my husband's elderly parents.

On our first day there, we met up with my friend Patri, and proceeded to the Norton Simon Museum. Well, we did a kind of a whirlwind tour there. We had gone for the Marcel Duchamp Redux show, which was quite a tiny show. It was literally a copy of a show they had had there decades earlier. They had mostly prints of about 14 pieces from the earlier 1963 show, all in one small room.

More exciting to me were a few pieces from the post painterly abstract painters Sam Francis and Helen Frankenthaler; especially the Frankenthaler piece (pictured here), which was a huge, all orange stain painting (orange -- my favorite color! So exciting!!!).  Here is a snippet of a quote I copied from the gallery card for this painting: "What concerns me is -- did I make a beautiful picture?" Well, I'd have to say emphatically, YES! I think (I'm afraid) I have similar sensibilities, whether that be good or not so good these days. What can I say?

There were some other great pieces in the room, "Tall Figure IV" by Giacometti; "Three Standing Figures," 1953, by Henry Moore; >"Untitled," 1962-63 by Robert Irwin; 1947, "Horseman," by Marino Marini; and "Bottles," 1960, by Diebenkorn (pictured on the right). And more, but I didn't have a chance to take any more names or notes.

We spent a few minutes looking at some of their Impressionist collection -- admiring the perfect yellow Van Gogh had used to paint a straw hat and a tree (2 different works), a couple of pieces of Cezanne's, including one of his fantastic tulips paintings, and at least one Monet.

We also peered at the "On the Enlightened Path: Jain Art from India"; "Ruth Weisberg: Guido Cagnacci and the Resonant Image"; "Under the Influence: Art-Inspired Art"; and "The Art of War: American Posters from World War I and World War II" -- the poster art exhibit in particular which was really quite fascinating.

Painting (right) by Richard Diebenkorn
"Bottles"
1960

Painting by Susan Rothenberg
"Triphammer Bridge"
1974
Synthetic polymer paint and tempera on canvas
67 1/8" x 9' 7 3/8"

More Notes from Art School, SAIC, 1991

More artists to look at:

• Leon Golub: lots of layers, painting, disrupting it, etc.
• Roche Rabell
• de Kooning
• Rothenburg: investigation of same form; break it down, open it up, more abstracted. Space horse is in; deconstructing, reconstructing. Another layer of movement added by lines.
• Donald Sultan, Clyfford Still - idea of shape.
• Palladino
• *Louisa Chase; Frankenthaler
• *Forest Bess - visionary abstraction.
• Phillip Taffe - simplified landscape.
• Baziotes, Jonathon Lasker - the role of line.
• Louise Bourgeois
• Gary Stephen
• Terry Winters

Figuration and abstraction.
How ideas are developed.
Comes from nature.
Look at source periodically.

Can you not go back and be very particular after moving fast, getting abstract?

Look at:
Diebenkorn (Diebenkorn's missing works) - colors on cigar box top - beautiful: Yellow, lavendar, green, pink, peach, white - very pale with strip of red, brown. Archeological presence of landscape - strata, layers.

Giorgio Morandi - simplicity of shapes. The less there is to look at, the more you look at it (a specific edge). Drawing aspect vs. painting aspect - how to find out from different material.

• Paul Klee - still lifes.
• Gregory Gillespie - very intense - collage (too tight) + wonderfully encrusted walls.
• William Bailey
• Nicholas de Stael
• Pat Stier - 3 still lifes.
• Giacometti - drawing as a presence in the painting.
• Brice Marden - calligraphic, gets looser as time goes by, more figurative. Great interview here.
• Joan Mitchell - more of Joan Mitchell
• Mel Bochner drawings - lines of force.
• Romare Bearden - NOT flat collages.
• *Charles Burchfield
• Kenny Sharf
  
• Malcolm Morley
• Sherrie Levine
• Jan Cherkey (?)
• Melissa Miller
• Roberto Matta, more
  
• Robert Stackhouse, more
• Jake Barlow (Batow?)
• Ross Bleckner

Painting by Hans Hoffman
"The Golden Wall"
Oil on Canvas
59½ x 71½"
1961

Class notes from Drawing the Figure in Space with Elizabeth Rupprecht, SAIC, 1991

Purpose: to create form; to find an equivalent for life.

Check out Frank Stella's "Working Spaces." Exploring another area of cubism.

Cut up something and rearrange it within a grid. Implied floorplane.

Look at Hoffman's "Golden Wall" in the museum.

Look at Holbein for eyes, mouth. Look at Giacometti.

Nose and ear are often parallel, curved or straight, whatever.