Burton Dickerson, A Blog

As usual, I am the last to know. There seems to exist art and the production of art on a grand scale that doesn’t even touch our sphere of activity. The artist, the gallery and the market as we are familiar with barely functions to any influential degree. You might add, easel painting survives only at the hobby level ( cookie sales )
Art is produced today on larger than life proportions and represents a collective effort or collaboration…artist, promoter,backers, prefabricators ,
architects, corporate interests,metropolitan planners. Art has moved outdoors. Often the dwelling is the art.
Did it begin with Christo? Anselm Kiefers’ massive canvases were ready for installation long before they were painted. These are not easel paintings. Some paintings are rendered on the entire side of a building.
What of the building in Paris.. the Pompadou ? Everything has moved to the outside including plumbing.
Lets look back in history a bit. The Church was the central point that moved art… a large scale, collective effort; the Pope, artist, church money. With the demise of the church as sponsor, Reformation in Holland especially, the scale of art was reduced. Easel painting prevailed into the gallery system of Paris, New York.
But now today, corporate and public money moves art. Massive sculpture can be seen in the public square and on private estates. A huge Picasso sculpture, thanks to collective effort, stands in the public square.
The remarkable Veitnam Memorial in D C belongs to all of us.
And to the struggling artist, go to your easel and keep painting. Be happy
I would be pleased if you would add or delete these thoughts. B

“sophistication “- A word once used to describe a person of worldly experience and knowledge, and skill. In more recent times, with the development of technology, the word is applied to objects and systems. This is especially true in the of area of weapons of war and space exploration. During WWII a similar word was used to describe the highly selective use of bombs and shells..’.” accuracy “. The military boasted of a bombsight on their aircraft so accurate that it could drop a bomb in a pickle barrel’ .. no mention of the town that produced the pickle barrel.
A more recent term in our vocabulary is “selectivity”. ..weapons so selective that they could seek out and kill the enemy and leave the innocent unharmed.
Word usage is trickey in all areas ,even Art.

Certainly there are more current art movements taking place in studios in art centers all over the country, and in University art departments. Those activists, therein, would snicker and snort if they stumbled into this forum and read about our concerns dealing with painting that have changed, not at all, since the 60’s. Indeed I wish some avant gard painter would tune in and enlighten us, and perhaps show us some of their work. I am sure there is a whole new dialog and vocabulary taking place that might benefit us. We all know what it’s like to be left behind.
I have seen some of the current art work in art publications by younger artists. I need enlightening !

“Our children were pulled away from us before their characters were fully developed. This brief passage I ran into while sifting through old letters from my father, now long deceased. It referred to our hasty departure into military service during World War 11 and the diminishing roll of family and community on our character development. At first I was quite sure that my father meant the usual follies that youth is heir to… but time pursuaded me there was much more in his comment that even he did not foresee.
The critical period between high school and early adulthood, about 18 to 21 is normally a cumbersome, but steady period of maturation. Family and community share in it. That was lost.
But didn’t that high adventure, off to war, present each of us with unending challenges that solidified character and maturity ? I have thought if over many times and at my tender age of 82… I have concluded that the youth of our time were cheated, suckered out of those vital years. .. and we have subtly come up short over and over again. Our ability to make decisions. plan, advise, relate, evaluate… suffered from that void. I do not discount the moral and ethical aspects of this issue.
” Off to war, indeed! An artillery bombardment does not build character, it creates hamburger. How to live elbow to elbow with a thousand men is a noble condition in the minds of politicians.
At the end of that important time period, most young people should flow from high school well into adulthood. At the end of three years, we were starting over.
Anyone else ?

“Art does not need the support of dialog “… That was a phrase I used to toss around with careless abandon in the past. More correctly.. “The artist needs the support of dialog.” I used to hear the same meaningless diatribe on art and criticism over and over again, and it failed to move the cause of art one inch, nor did it help the artist paint a
better picture.
In this present Forum I have come to realize that open communication helps to alleviate the isolation that so many of us find ourselves in. That aloneness breeds self doubt, but knowing there are others engaged in the same struggle, we are not so alone…we are blessed with our own cheering section. This kind of fellowship wasnt quite the same back in the days of Academia… it was more competitive, more critical.
Now we are happy to be away from that and on our own, but it can be lonely. If we stay in touch, we can share our common problems, and we can help each other. B

John Swanstrom was at lunch yesterday… that’s where I took his photo… We reminisced. Our memory, together, goes back as far as 5or 6 days. Then things get foggy.
However, we did recall sharing in the purchase of a huge reame of watercolor paper (”48x “55 ) each sheet…. heavy duty. I was preparing for an upcoming sabbatical leave.. one full semester. I intended to paint acrylic on paper during the entire period. It worked perfectly. Each day I tacked a large sheet of W.C. paper onto a board and blazed away without further preparation…. no priming, stretching, nor framing. It was here that I finally switched from oils to acrylics. And it was here that I left the burdensome, self imposed formalism of the abstract expressionism that I had saddled myself with. It was a joyous period. .. no restrictions, just flailing brush strokes, followed by arbitrary gridwork installed.
Nearly every painting you see in my collection with the grid motif idea was done during that sabbatical period. Every thing went great. The combination of chaos and order fit well.
I worked in a rented studio downtown over the hardware on Main
I had not realised until then how I had restricted myself to such formal, compositional rules of the game.
Only after the sabbatical ended was I faced with the perplexing task of how to mount and frame the 30or 40 gems. More on that later. It is an ugly story. D

Another episode envolving the Detroit Institute of Art took place in 1965-66 or thereabout. The annual Michigan juried art exhibit ( Founders Society ) had been going on for years. The usual fare, realistic regionalism and the current abstract expressionism was pretty much the offering. Opening night to these affairs displayed paintings floor to ceiling : very few rejects it seemed.
Suddenly in 1966, a New York artist of the “hard edge ” school named George Ortman, was selected as that years sole juror.
Well ! He swept the board….final selection amounted to 40 paintings., instead of the usual 200. Nearly all were hard edge and pop art. All others were tossed out, including mine. A memorable painting in the show as I recall was a small one 9×12 ” , all black with the word ” cat ‘ crudely printed on.
The Michigan art scene was shaken to it’s foundation. From that year forward, New York art dictated the direction of art throughout the country. Probably, the local art scene needed a jolt. For better or worse, things changed.
There were more trips to New York and the gallery circuit. Art magazine circulation expanded A whole new point of view developed. Art schools flourished. We had to decide whether we were Sunday painters or Professional.

Another moderately interesting story about my painting– While still teaching, I rolled up three big canvases and, with my wife, took them down to the DIA ( Detroit Institute of Art) to the director of Contemporary Art. He had agreed to evaluate their artistic merit with a written statement.
In his office, I unfurled the canvases on the floor (very formal) for his purusal- which turned out to be very favorable.
Near closing time we departed with canvases rolled up on my shoulder and headed for the stairwell. We descended about four flights of stairs only to discover that each exit door was locked, as were all entry doors , thus believing that we might spend overnight in the stairway at the DIA.
We began to ascend and try each exit door, finally one opened out onto the mezzanine with its darkened galleries filled with masterpieces. Expecting to have a warning shot fired across our bow, we found our way to the great descending staircase with our roll of paintings, and down to the main lobby, where oddly enough, a uniformed guard cheerfully waved us out the front door with our loot.

The above painting which I call ” Birmingham ” has an interesting story behind it. Painted in about 1978, I sold it to an interior decorator through a Birmingham Mi. gallery. The decorator used it on a number of occasions as the centerpiece for his interior designs. Eventually he swapped it for some antique furniture. I had seen the painting several times in various publications including House Beautiful. A few years ago the painting appeared again in the Sunday Detroit Free Press as part of a feature article… about a Bloomfield Hills home decorated by our decorator using my painting as the focal point of his decor. The Free Press writer called attention to the ‘ Han Hoffman ” hanging in the home. At that point I had a small fit of apoplexy. I immediately called the Free Press and spoke to the writer of the article . She swore that the home owner told her that the painting was indeed a ” Hans Hoffman.
To shorten the story, a few days later the decorator called me and apologised for the misunderstanding and would correct the situation ,forthwith. That was the last I ever heard about it. The owner of the painting either thinks he owns a Hoffman or doesn’t care.

John Canaday, now long gone, the old art historian and NY Times art critic, used to present a nifty package of the historical process showing the transition of art from the close of the 19th century into 20th century modernism.
He began with the demise of Impressionism, which had turned painting into colored air, destroying form and structure.
Four main artists: Georges Seutat, Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin, began the process of putting art ” back together again “. The era was called (post) Neo- Impressionism. Cezanne and Seurat were the classicists or formalists. Van Gogh and Gauguin were the Romanticists.
Painters who followed either pair took the path of the classicists leading to ” Geometric Abstraction”. Or they were pursuaded by Van Gogh and Gauguin into the direction of Abstract Expressionism. Van Gogh in particular appealed to the emotional spirit of German Expressionism, which found it’s way into the United States eventually, notably by Hans Hoffman.
If we look more closely at the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, who often painted together and similarly, we see Picasso’s cubism as more outward and explosive and Braques’ as more contained.
Let me recommend ‘Mainstreams of Modern Art by John Canaday– “an oldie but goodie. D
Ps- Canaday lacked the contemporary spirit to carry the story beyond Picasso.