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Placing Harvey QuaytmanDore Ashton

Early in our friendship Harvey Quaytman made me a gift of his cherished copy of Artur Schnabel’s My Life and Music. Years later, he titled a painting after the pianist’s book. Quaytman’s tread, as a visual artist, was always tempered by his inner ear, alert to intervals played out in time and space. While Quaytman was a highly literate painter, well acquainted with all the arts and their history, I believe he felt the deepest affinities with what his idol Schnabel called the ‘direct musician,’ who is a gardener, while the indirect musician is a botanist. During a question period after the lectures that make up his book, Schnabel was asked what the ideal should be for a person performing music, and ‘if it all comes from within a person.’ Without hesitation he responded: ‘Love has to be the starting point – love of music. It is one of my firmest convictions, that love always produces some knowledge, while knowledge only rarely produces something similar to love.’

Sometimes, embedded in a title, Quaytman’s affinities for the other arts appear, as when he titled a painting Warsaw Thirds (no. 57) in 1986. Since a third is a musical interval, I took this painting to be a tribute to Chopin, the celebrated Polish pianist, and a hint of Quaytman’s thoughts transposed into a painting. In a different key is the title Quince Days, a painting of 1979. Fellow travellers would recognize immediately Wallace Stevens’ poem Peter Quince at the Clavier, especially as Quaytman’s visual construction hints at the strings of a piano. As Stevens says: ‘Just as my fingers on these keys / Make music, so the selfsame sounds / On my spirit make music, too.’

It was, I think, from his spirit that Quaytman drew the notes that punctuated the various phases in his career as a painter, phases that he developed over his working life like movements in a symphony. From the earliest essays to his last works – works wrought with a kind of Blakean fearful symmetry – Quaytman’s oeuvre reflects a musical sensibility. In this he has a kinship with another modern artist, Paul Klee, who was an accomplished pianist. When Klee wrote his whimsical lecture notations for art students, his vocabulary often reflected his immersion in piano music.

1 Harvey Quaytman, New York, 1964.

2 Harvey Quaytman in his studio, Cambridge, MA, 1963.

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For instance, his distinction between the ‘dividual’ and the ‘individual’ is set out in periodic intervals much like those in a musical scale. Quaytman was never far away from musical analogy, particularly when inventing colours, which he knew intuitively act upon our sensibilities. As Marcia Tucker, who admired Quaytman’s work, wrote: ‘Color, like music, can be apprehended without recourse to ideas. We experience color without having to understand it, partly because by its very nature – its complexity, mystery, variety and adaptability – color touches vision, perception and emotion, which are basic and available to everyone with eyes.’1

I recall, somewhat mistily, talking with Quaytman about the painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, whom he admired. I can well understand Quaytman’s lingering with Chardin, whom Diderot – that distinguished advocate for the imagination – considered a great magician. Diderot quoted Chardin – ‘Does one paint with colors? With what then? With feelings.’ – and adds: ‘One understands nothing of this magic.’

In Chardin’s day, the artist had to be something of a chemist. The palette was made of essences of plants, powdered stones, oxidized substances, metallic limestone and whatever else might be found to capture the tones of nature. An artist ground and mixed and tested within oil and turpentine. So did Quaytman’s inventions (his rust paintings) derive from his love of exploring matter itself and the ways in which he, the magician, could exploit it. Perhaps he bore in mind what Chardin had told a student: ‘You seek, you scrape, you rub, you glaze, and when you have got hold of something that pleases, the picture is finished.’2

Late in his career – on the last day of 1986 – Quaytman offered a statement for an exhibition at the Nielsen Gallery in Boston. In it there are dim echoes of his verbal playfulness, always present in his titles. He was, after all, an admirer of James Joyce, as we can hear in such titles as Mauverick (1964, no. 3) or Second Cupola Capella (1969, no. 9). In the statement, Quaytman’s humor weaves in and out, with glimpses of its origins in Jewish culture, as when he cites Ned Rifkind speaking of his work as ‘hopeful, opulent and stark’, and remarks that the word ‘stark’ has ‘a similar word base to the German/Yiddish schtarke’. But perhaps the most telling hint in the statement occurs in the very last line, in which he commands his reader: ‘Listen to Shönberg’s Verklarte Nacht just once.’

In 1964 – the year Quaytman settled in New York – the university-educated artist Allan Kaprow published a widely remarked article in Art News with the challenging title, ‘Should the Artist be a Man of the World?’3 Obviously, he thought so, and he endeavoured to characterize the world of his generation (he was five years older than Quaytman) in these words: ‘The men and women of today’s generation matured during and directly after WWII, rather than during the Depression. They are almost all college-educated, and are frequently married, with children. Many of them teach or have taught. On the street they are indistinguishable from the middle-class from which they come and towards whose mores – practicality, security and self-advancement – they tend to generate.’

Quaytman appreciated writers who made sense of nonsense. One of his favorites was Erik Satie, who, in his Memoirs of An Amnesiac of 1912, wrote about his composition for four hands on the piano, Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear: ‘One sees that not only musical ideas presided on the creation of these works.’ Quaytman’s keyboard, then, had complicated origins and was, as he once told me, basically ‘enharmonic.’

3 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Basket of Wild Strawberries, c.1760. Private collection.

4 Willem de Kooning, Still Life, 1945. Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA.

5 Ben Nicholson, 1944–5 (painted relief), 1944–5. The Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney.

6 Josef Albers, Study for Homage to the Square: with Rays, 1959. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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London was undergoing considerable artistic upheaval, some of it in response to a travelling exhibition called 'The New American Painting', which circulated to eight European countries, including Great Britain, in 1958–59. Quaytman saw in London the impact of New York School painters, most evidently Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. In some of his earliest painting extant, Quaytman can be seen manipulating rectangular shapes as did Gorky, and working with the loose brushing of de Kooning. At the same time, he was looking closely at British abstract painters, particularly, I suspect, Ben Nicholson. By the time he settled in New York in 1964, he had assimilated aspects of the British abstract tradition, and evolved a choice of shapes that remained in his painting vocabulary: hourglass, pendulum and hammock-like swing.

During the 1960s, New York became an irresistible beacon for aspiring young American artists. The Second World War had cut off America from Europe, resulting in two important changes in New York. The first involved dozens of established European modernist visual artists taking shelter from the war and fraternizing with American counterparts. American painters and sculptors met for the first time legendary artists from Paris, such as Fernand Léger and André Masson. The second change concerned the art market, which for modern art was now concentrated in the United States, with New York City at its heart. By the 1960s, when Quaytman arrived, it was the largest in the world. Paris never recovered.

By the time Quaytman settled on the Bowery in 1966, things had radically changed from the scenes that Jean Dubuffet had immortalized in his series of Bowery Bum paintings from 1951–52. In the early 1950s there had been only around 30 respectable art galleries in New York. By the 1960s there were more than 300, which between them staged some 4,000 exhibitions a year. Young artists such as Quaytman had every reason to hope that they would make their mark in a city so full of opportunity – or if not to gain success in the marketplace, at least to be available if called.

Quaytman would quickly make the acquaintance of others who, like him, managed to survive doing odd jobs such as helping to restore old lofts for other artists or painting the walls of middle-class apartments. People in his age group tended to settle downtown on the East Side and would encounter each other in the streets and bars. One of Quaytman’s first buddies was the painter Jake Berthot, who remembers frequent sorties to the Essex Street market and lunches at Moishe’s, the last of the famed Depression years delicatessens.

7 Harvey Quaytman, New York City, late 1960s. Courtesy Frances Barth.

8 Harvey Quaytman's loft, New York City, mid-1960s. Courtesy Frances Barth.

9 New York artists, early 1970s (left to right, back to front): Doug Ohlson, Murray Reich, Kes Zapkus, Don Lewallen, Jake Berthot, Alan Cote, Kaare Rafoss, Frances Barth, Bill Alpert, Stuart Shedletsky, Harvey Quaytman. Courtesy Frances Barth.

(Interestingly, while Quaytman relished the cuisine at Moishe’s, he was never eager to look into his heritage. His family came from Lodz, in Poland, a background from which he had distanced himself resolutely at an early age.) Quaytman would frequently meet up with his peers at a bar–restaurant called Fanelli’s, in Soho. Doug Ohlson, Richard van Buren, the neo-Dadaist Fluxus artist Joe Jones, and Ron Gorchov were among the regulars.

Kaprow definitely exaggerated. The life that Harvey Quaytman carpentered during those early years in New York was hardly characterized by such bourgeois decorum, though up to a point, Quaytman did conform to Kaprow’s characterization of artists of the 1960s. He was a graduate, in 1959, of both Tufts University and the Boston Museum School. He won a fellowship upon graduation which took him and his bride, Susan Howe, and their newborn infant, Rebecca, to London, where Quaytman had his first one-man show at the small AIA Gallery. In addition to his important experiences in British museums, he encountered the city itself.

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In His Own WordsHarvey Quaytman and Kimmo Sarje

Last Monday was my fiftieth birthday. I’m a very old person. I did all my worrying last year. I painted like a madman. I painted five times more than I ordinarily paint. I was so anxious to accomplish something. And what happened was, now I can’t stop. I can’t slow down, because it’s exciting. It’s exhilarating and a little frightening.

Have you been an abstract painter through your whole career? Yes. What is very important for me is that most of my life I made shaped paintings and I used to refer to them as just paintings, because I was very proud of the lack of associations. In my older paintings the space was totally literal: it was what it was. Two or three years ago my paintings started to go into a rectangle. In my older paintings I used to have a hole in the middle. At some point I dreamed this cross idea which covered the hole. Since then my whole aesthetic has changed. What my paintings are now I call pictures and not so much paintings. They can be paintings, but they are pictures in a way my shaped paintings could never have been pictures. They have all the stuff I was proud of not dealing with: an old-fashioned space and allusions. One curator saw an annunciation… and I thought: ‘My God, I’ve come along way. I’m just making paintings.’ In the beginning it horrified me, when people saw things I certainly didn’t want to put in my paintings. Later I made my peace with it. And I saw that it’s a kind of exciting thing that I’m no longer a total controller of the painting, of the images.

In your recent paintings you use the cross form, which is a Christian symbol but which is also an important sign in the history of abstract art. How do you interpret it? Well, almost everybody who comes to see these paintings at some point asks me about Kazimir Malevich.

Sure. I think that that Malevich has a strong presence in this studio. Well, I would hope that Malevich is present in an important way: his sense of optimism and utopianism, and that would be more present than the similarity of these crosses… roughly speaking, the difference between American Minimalism and Russian Suprematism is the difference between materialism and utopianism. The difference is that in the works of the Suprematists there is a great hope in the future and in a better world, whereas the Americans are quite satisfied with the here and now… in American Minimalism there is so little culture. I’m interested more in values than how the pictures look. The funny thing is that I have never loved Malevich’s paintings, but I love his mind and spirituality.

18 Kazimir Malevich, Black Cross, 1923. Musée National d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

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However, there is a crucial difference between old and new Minimalism: irony. That’s true… I think there is not a touch of irony in my painting. It’s the opposite of irony… but I like the humor and irony of Neo Geo. I have been in some shows with Philip Taaffe and Peter Halley. It amuses me. If you put these pictures of mine next to Halley, it tells you what his pictures are and aren’t, and vice versa. I think that my pictures turn much more serious next to Halley. But I don’t mind that interplay and dialogue.

I agree. Your works are very serious and they even remind me of Protestant clericalism. Really… it’s surprising because I’m Jewish.

Your critique is interesting. I think there is now a tendency in American abstract art away from materialism and towards idealism, away from an ahistorical here-and-now attitude. The older and mid-career artists seem to be changing their views, but not so much the younger ones. Some of the Neo Geo people are using the same old Minimalist strategy, I mean materialism. They are quite happy with basketballs in water or something like that. It’s very American.

You said that you are more interested in values than the visual look of the artworks. How do you see the relation of your paintings to social values and criticism? I’m interested in making paintings with a one hundred percent guarantee of moral integrity, which I think is the only contribution a painter can make to social justice. I mean, if you are able to concentrate everything you believe into your work, then it’s ethically and socially valuable. … The sense of integrity and avoidance of

easy answers – these kind of paintings can be like moral sign posts in society… the moral is the result of the aesthetics. When the aesthetic decisions are made with absolute integrity, then I hope they also have a moral resonance.

You said that Malevich is an important source of inspiration for your art. Are there other artists you would like to mention? I enjoy looking at Olga Rozanova, Liubov Popova and Vladimir Tatlin. I like their works aesthetically, but I like even more their ideas and intentions. Ironically, the artist who most strikes me is Henri Matisse. His late cut-outs are especially important for me, because of their coloristic generosity. Some colors he uses you can see in my works, like the blue, the yellow… and the red and black, too.

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19 Harvey Quaytman's studio, New York, with unfinished painting, 2000. Courtesy Renee McKee.

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HQ Have you specific meanings for the colors you use? I have no specific meanings, but a color must mean something to me before I use it. I must love that color and it must strike me. For instance, yellow – I’m aware of twenty different yellows, and in any given point of my life I’m using only two or three of them, and I do that because those particular yellows spoke to me at that time. These are mostly dark yellows. There was a time I using lemon yellow, but it doesn’t speak to me just now. I just discovered this blue in Germany last year, and it resonates in my soul. Apparently the colors I use have to do with saturation, like that blue. It’s not in any way violet or green. It’s not going anywhere. It’s right there. That excites me. In none of these paintings do I mix one color with another, because that seems to me to be wasting the specific energy of any one. Sometimes I put one color on top of another, but I never mix two together. … This black here, which I also get from Germany, is a real ivory black. It’s ironic: it used to be a white elephant tusk, and now it’s the blackest of all the blacks – so it’s burned white and it’s also the only transparent black. It has qualities that are very valuable for me. I never used black before I found this one, but once I found this ivory black it was so exciting that I couldn’t keep my hands off. I use it a lot, but things will change. One color I think I will never use again is green. I think I dislike green for exactly same reasons that Piet Mondrian disliked it. He hated green even in nature. I like it in nature and I like it to stay there, but I can’t even imagine it in a painting of mine, not in this group of paintings anyway. I used to use purple when I was 35, deep purple, with the thought that it’s a color which gives profundity to painting. It’s funny the ideas you have when you are growing up as a painter. It was a mistaken idea.

Helsinki 1987

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3 Mauverick, 1964. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 50.8 cm / 30 × 20 in. The Estate of Harvey Quaytman. 4 Swingline Grape, 1965. Oil on canvas, 189.2 × 163.8 cm / 74 ½ × 64 ½ in. The Estate of Harvey Quaytman.

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5 Untitled, 1969. Aquatec on canvas, 81.3 × 66 cm / 32 × 26 in. The Estate of Harvey Quaytman.

6 Bird Blanket, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 273.1 × 154.9 cm / 107 ½ × 61 in. Collection of Lewis Lapham, New York.

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7 Moon Fancy, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 91.4 × 276.9 cm / 36 × 109 in. McKee Gallery, New York.

8 Little Egypt, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 125.1 × 288.3 cm / 49 ¼ × 113 ½ in. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts.

494819 Squall, 1973. Acrylic on canvas, 144.8 × 475 cm / 57 × 187 in. Location unknown.

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37 Untitled, 1980. Acrylic on paper, 58.4 × 58.4 cm / 23 × 23 in. The Estate of Harvey Quaytman.

38 Wall Drawing, 1980. Acrylic on canvas, 88.3 × 83.8 cm / 34¾ × 33 in. Collection of Debbie and Andy Rachleff, California.

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39 Untitled, 1981. Acrylic on canvas, 88.9 × 83.8 cm / 35 × 33 in. Collection of Jeanne and Martin Puryear, New York.

40 WHrondo, 1981. Acrylic on canvas, 88.9 × 83.8 cm / 35 × 33 in. Collection of Renee and David McKee, New York.

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41 Flightpath Wall, 1980. Acrylic on canvas, 317.5 × 328.3 cm / 125 × 129 in. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

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42 Angelogic, 1983. Acrylic on canvas, 119.4 × 322.6 cm / 47 × 127 in. The Estate of Harvey Quaytman.

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61 Pyrite Sliver, 1986. Acrylic and rust on canvas, 95.3 × 95.3 cm / 37½ × 37½ in. Collection of Monina von Opel and Edward Miller, New York.

62 Epithalamion, 1986. Acrylic and rust on canvas, 94 × 94 cm / 37 × 37 in. Collection of Karen Davidson, Michigan.

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88 Raft III, 1993. Acrylic on canvas, 116.8 × 116.8 cm / 46 × 46 in. The Estate of Harvey Quaytman.

89 Angel, 1993. Acrylic on canvas, 203.2 × 203.3 cm / 80 × 80 in. Collection of Lynnie and Richard Dewey, California.