Rediscovering Zola Marcus
Rediscovering Zola Marcus
at
The Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center
January to
May 2017
by Ken Fitch
Once again, the
estimable Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center in Asheville, North
Carolina, continuing its series of rediscoveries of the remarkable individuals
who were participants in the Black Mountain College experience that included
Dan Rice, Pat Passlof and Ray Spillenger, among others, has brought its focus
now to the work of another distinctive artist, Zola Marcus.
With this exhibition of
discovery of yet another individual whose work reflects the remarkable
experience of those working in a range of disciplines who came to this enclave
in the mid-20th Century, the work of Zola Marcus takes its place among that of
the artists who threaded out into the art world of the late 20th Century.
In this small, vivid
exhibition of the work of Zola Marcus, we find masterworks worthy to hang
alongside those of his contemporaries in the museums of the world.
Untitled
1984-95 oil on linen
60x42 inches Collection of
Julie Feinsilver
Zola Marcus’ work is an
ultra personal statement that both corresponds and responds to the intensive
art world in which continuum his work potently resides.
Untitled 1974
oil on canvas 14x20 inches Black
Mountain College Museum + Art Center Collection
Gift of Julie Feinsilver
His work is
individually bold and confident, with an emotional implosion that generates a
subsequent explosion across the canvas that is compelling.
His work presents a
panoramic arc of the late 20th century as he assuredly moves through
the continuum, layering his artistic presentation with stylistic accretion and
overlay that seems almost autobiographical, emerging through journeys in color
and form that display an almost organic progression that renders the later
works as living and continuing, as these works were subject to reworking and
reactivation.
Thus, we see bold, deliberate slashes and
strokes of color across the landscape of the canvas, but then also, the gestural application that reflects the action of creation at a hot
point, all generated by emotion, but
assuredly controlled and vividly and totally calculated.
Untitled, 1985
oil on linen, 14 x 32 inches.
Collection of Julie Feinsilver
Even the thin lines
that appear in some of the smaller canvases, that may seem to verge on
structural, have an emotional wiring in their existence that is felt rather
than engineered, embedding in clusters of patched colors in and over merging
color fields.
Untitled n.d., oil on linen 36 x 48
inches. Collection of Alan Feinsilver
Detail from Untitled,
oil on linen,
24x14 inches. Collection of Alan
Feinsilver
The strong lines that
deliberately breakup and geometrize the canvas (as seen in the early works from Paris), in the later work are then
funneled through a powerful prism of extensions that threaten to stretch beyond
the canvas, but also with the exuberance of glorious basking in color as bold
and rich as that of any of his contemporaries.
Quatre Personages sur Seine,
ca. 1950, oil on canvas, 21.5 x 25.5 inches. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
Detail from Untitled, 1984-95, oil on linen, 60 x 42 inches.
Collection of Julie Feinsilver
One can sense an
autobiographical journey here as the styles of his early explorations remain
embedded in the canvas, traversed by overlays that are equally controlled and
studied, but let loose in medium and gesture with an awesome range of intensity
in the flow that rigorously takes over the canvas.
Clearly, his experience
with the paint and canvas becomes intensely personal, unraveling and trammeling
his psyche in the flow and intensity of the paint. The rendering lines and
applications possess an energy that is almost palpable that confronts us
spatially and emotionally with an amazing duality when encountering the work:
First, there is the
special power of the larger canvases that signal their presence to us from
afar, from the distance across the gallery:
Untitled, n.d., oil on linen, 44 x 34 inches. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
Up close, when one enters the aura field of
the canvas, we are compelled to confront an additional immediate vibrancy that,
although safely confined to the realm of paint on the plane of canvas, is both
unsettling and totally deliberative, as we too experience and relive each
emotional assignation with the canvas.
Detail from Chasm,
n.d., oil on linen 62 x 41 inches.. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
Detail from Moonswept,
n.d., oil on linen, 36 x 48 inches. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
Some of the individual
gestures, in their direct engagement, equal in power the impact of the total
canvas seen from afar, so that a microcosmic/macrocosmic duality is also
present as one interacts with these works.
Detail from Untitled, n.d., oil on
linen, 44 x 34 inches. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
Whenever one zooms in
on any detail, the energy is palpable in the gestural flow, nodes and
affixation, an energy that emerges from a place deeply within, whether in the
amazing gestural intrusions, or the longer banding strokes.
Detail from
Chasm, n.d., oil on linen,
62 x 41inches. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
Detail from Moonswept,
n.d., oil on linen, 36 x 48 inches. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
Detail from Interaction,
n.d., oil on linen, 22 x 22 inches. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
Detail from Moonswept,
n.d., oil on linen, 36 x 48 inches. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
Detail from Untitled,
1985-95, oil on linen, 60 x 42 inches. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
One senses that all he
took in would eventually flow out onto the canvases following lines of embedded
personal experiences that energize the strokes and gestures that create these
emotionally insistent and vibrant canvascapes.
This exhibition offers
the opportunity to step back to fully observe the panorama of his work that
flows from the arc of his journey as an artist and also recognize his place in
the wider, denser visual continuum of the late 20th century in which
his work resides.
Although Zola Marcus
came to Black Mountain College as a “student,” he had previously studied with
Hans Hofmann in New York and then with Léger in Paris, and his masterful works
from that Parisian period, shown here to stunning effect, reveal a high level
of accomplishment in style, execution and presentation.
Installation of Zola Marcus’ Cubist
works at Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center 2017
His application to the
College reveals a purpose that finds echoing resonance in the annals of the
Black Mountain College experience, as he states in his 1953 letters to the
Registrar of Black Mountain College:
“I
shall find the need to get some intensive painting done. Thus I am interested in attending your
college for that period [July 1953], so that I may work in a stimulating
atmosphere and at the same time enjoy the environment that Black Mountain may
offer.”
And:
“It
was my hope to be able to go someplace where I shall be able to paint in an
atmosphere conducive to creative work.”
The choice of a journey
to Black Mountain College was probably not at all arbitrary, on a rebounding
path from Paris where Léger’s students included some of the artists soon to
emerge and take their place on the contemporary NY Art Scene, including Black
Mountain College alumnus Kenneth Noland, among others. Léger’s connection and
affinity with Black Mountain College were well known, as Léger had visited the
campus, his works hung there, one of his chief patrons, Katherine Dreier, was
also a major benefactor for the College, and Léger’s lifetime collegial
interactions included Willem de Kooning and Buckminster Fuller. After Marcus’
residencies in Rome and Florence, Black Mountain College would be THE place to
go to explore, expand, and extend his artistic exploration in a compatible and
vibrant environment.
Zola Marcus’ artistic
journey certainly mirrors and reflects the visioning dynamics of his mentors:
Following Hofmann, he merged Cubist structure with Fauvist and Expressionist
colors, in a clustering of expression that would take him on the route to Paris
to the studio of Léger, another artist whose work shared the primacy of paint.
Leger’s emphasis on the
three components of lines, forms and colors would also be realized dramatically
in the works that Zola Marcus would bring forth there, and later, throughout
his life.
Detail from La Mére,
ca 1950, oil on canvas, 32 by 25.5 inches. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
Just as Hofmann and
Léger were spurred by their early
experiences with Cubism, Fauvism and the
stunning works being created, Zola Marcus would move forward
on this continuum, and thus, in
his work, reflect, with great depth and
textural implant, the implementation and
realization of so many intrinsic
principles that drew power from the medium in which paint was primacy, and in
which he and his predecessors had worked
and explored.
Zola Marcus’s
progression is entirely logical and personal, considering his mentors (and
their associations). Indeed, he may have achieved Hofmann’s oft-stated purpose
in achieving a synthesis of Cubist architecture and Fauvist color. The Cubist
organization that was one of the hallmarks of Hofmann’s teaching would serve
Marcus well in the amazing interacting organization of elements that
characterized the Abstract Expressionist works that would be dominant for the
remainder of his life. Hofmann’s theory
of “Push and Pull” can be discerned also on many levels in Marcus’ later work.
Detail from Untitled,
n.d., oil on linen, 18 x 36 inches. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
At Black Mountain College in 1953, studying
painting with Esteban Vicente, exploring ceramics with Warren MacKenzie, Daniel
Rhodes and Peter Voulkos, and working in
community in the presence of Merce Cunningham, Stefan Wolpe and a
host of other teachers and students in other disciplines, would be an
inevitably profound experience and contribute to the vivid expansion of his art
in transformational forms of exploration that would characterize the art that
flowed for the rest of his life, and now is suspended before us to engage us
with its multi-leveled panoramic experience.
That this artist and
his work, last exhibited in 1966, remain largely unknown, might be attributed
to the fact that, as posited by his friend, Bard College’s James H. Ottaway
Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics, Garry L. Hagberg, and others, he did
not produce a signature style-bending explosive work of the kind that
penetrated the postwar NY Art Scene.
Also, his early career-defining
accomplishments with their grounding in the traditional continuum may have been
an obstacle to his inclusion among the emergent breakout Abstract Expressionist
artists of the NY School.
He had emerged as a
distinguished accomplished artist in the tradition of the School of Paris at
the very time that its accomplishments, importance and relevance were met with
rejection and dismissal by his contemporary American artists, many of whom
would emerge in the subsequent categories of Color-Field and Post-Painterly
Abstraction.
The success of his accomplishments in Paris
may have been distinctive, but not necessarily compatible with the rapidly
shifting, rigorous artistic categorization that was projected on the NY Art
Scene with the fierce dueling criteria of action and formalism, whereas his
work combined and multilayered such considerations, presenting a duality that
Professor Hagberg has insightfully observed in Zola’s work that operates on
many levels.
The awareness that his
distinctive Abstract Expressionist work combined the styles of painting that
polarized other artists and critics (into camps of action and formalism) might
have further encouraged him to avoid the contentious fray of competing
pronouncements, rivalries, jealousies and conflicts that raged through the
critical realm of the art scene within the culture, with its often polemical
categorizations and the shifting vagaries of commercial selection that was
inevitably arbitrary in dispersal of economic viability, a situation for which he often expressed
disdain.
Unlike the many
loquacious artists who felt a constant imperative to boldly affirm and proclaim
their presence and the significance of their art, personally, or collectively
as members of informal coalitions and spirited gatherings, there is little
indication that Zola Marcus stepped beyond the powerful realm of his personal
art and the weapons of paint and canvas. Indeed, despite prompts and
entreaties, he would always defer explanation or explication, and divert
attention from his art that seemed to reside in a distinctively strong private
nexus.
Further, while many of
the Abstract Expressionist artists were self-proclaimed and self-evident
outsiders, determinedly avant-garde in direction, often allied with strong
political engagement, and counter-cultural in relations to established and
changing forms of artistic expression, Zola Marcus inhabited a place within an
extended cultural continuum in which creative expression flowed from, around,
and beyond established pillars of cultural exploration.
His decidedly
individual path would follow a differently routed journey that would be a
realization of his individual personality and personal world experience.
The early arc of his
artistic journey was certainly, in its beginnings, American traditional:
Cornell University, The National Academy of Design, The Art Students League,
The Cummington School, then transitioning to The New School, and most
significantly, the critical jumpstart of the Hans Hofmann School and the
Atelier Fernand Léger in Paris.
Eventually, fresh from
his European exploration that also included
residencies in Rome and Florence, and penultimately, his summer at Black
Mountain College, he returned to New York, where he settled in Greenwich
Village, the haven for artists at the
time, although as yet, accounts of his interactions with the intense cluster of
artists who were situated there are still unknown. He would eventually move
north to Kips Bay and then to the small aerie of a rent-controlled apartment on
Park Avenue with a vital sun-basked alcove from which his painting blossomed,
ensconced in a haven, a place of refuge that might have been a blessing, not
far from the modernist architectural playground just South, and avoiding the
real estate explosion downtown that dislocated artists in the later decades of
the 20th century.
In his life’s journeys,
he always seemed to find a place from which to work in which his personal
vision and expression could thrive, informed directly and indirectly by a
cultural grounding that also clearly contributes to his artistic work and
serves to also give it such power, range
and authority.
Ultimately, it was
there in the small sunlit alcove of his apartment that he brought forth a
continuing series of works that are only now making a public appearance.
Like many of the other
innovative artists who might not have experienced the burst of fame in the
increasingly competitive and cutthroat NY Art Scene, Zola Marcus spent years as
a teacher at various levels from High School to College, and one wonders what
some of those students may eventually tell us of his teaching and his presence
among them, as this artist and his work now enter the spotlight of
retrospective that is actually, in many ways, a discovery. A particularly
intriguing consideration is his role as a “volunteer” at the Guggenheim Museum
in his later years, a place where the works of his mentor, Léger, prominently
hang, but one wonders if the Museum had any awareness of this artist and the
continuum he brought to that spiraled wonder.
Although he was far
from withdrawn from awareness of the work of his contemporaries in the art
world, including Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, as well as the works of
theoretical philosophers and critics from John Dewey to Clement Greenberg, as a
teacher, and possibly even a working colleague with others, he was well aware
of their work and their place in the world, and his work also solidly continues
on its own pathway through those years in fascinating complement with intensely
personal expressional realizations of his own. His work does reflect an attuned
response, both in exploration of the prompts and principles of his
mentor/teachers, with whom he interacted, but also the cultural landscape and
populace in which he lived.
Indeed, he was thoroughly engaged with the
diversity and richness of the New York Cultural Scene, attending opera, ballet,
concerts and exhibitions in an era now considered a golden age of accomplished
performances, and one can easily see and even hear that world resonating in
these works by an artist whose own radar was so attuned to the density of the
cultural world in which he found himself with sounding transferred into
powerful canvases of uncompromising engagement.
The touchstone comments
reported by his friends and family of the art events he experienced, become inescapably
informative of a person as wide ranging in the experience of the intensity of
the landscape of artistic activity in NYC during these years, and when prompted
by this reality, one begins to hear the music he so often cited, from the many
performances of the era which generated a truly visceral experience. It seems
clear that conversation about music and culture is a mode through which he
shared his world. When he talked about those flashpoints of cultural events and
engagements of that era, it is important to note that they were engagements
with powerful human experiences, densely and intensely rendered within formal
vehicles that seemed to loosen
expression all the more unrestrained.
Just as Hoffmann often
cited Beethoven in his visionary expositions, for the explorations of Zola
Marcus, perhaps the relevant counterpoint is the verismo/dramatic impulse that
one might see and hear in the operatic music that was the soundscape for much
of his life. One can readily hear Carmen,
Trovatore and Cavalleria, et. al. in some
of the visually intense renderings here.
Chasm, n.d., oil on linen, 62 x 41 inches.
Collection of Julie Feinsilver
However, in another
aspect of his range, when one looks to one of the extraordinary masterworks
here, the relevant music would almost certainly shift to the transcendent
romanticism of the music of a Wagnerian cosmos where we see and experience an
amazing work that verges on the transcendent, with a swirl of veiled strokes
ranging over and around vivid small clusters of jewel-like intensity. With its
swirling veils pulling us in, it elicits a dominant engagement that takes us in
to an inevitability, and perhaps the realm of the spiritual (that Hofmann often
posited).
Untitled, n.d., oil on linen, 44 x 34
inches, Collection of Julie Feinsilver
Installation
at Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center
His emotional
engagement as an artist is in Abstract Expressionist action mode, but, significantly,
also at play, is the role of a teacher, theoretician and observer that
contributes to a high degree of sophistication in the disposition and
organization of the elements in his canvases, a unique progression from the
vibrant Cubist works of his early years, contributing to the modal duality
noted by Professor Hagberg that also generates a tension and an intensity.
Although we are for the
most part drawn up in to the world of Abstract Expressionism, one senses that
the human connection has major immediate connection here, in its environmental
resonance (as works would hang in his apartment for periods of time, and
subject to interactive reworking and accretions), but one becomes aware also of
a real possibility of figurative elements very much alive within the swirl of
paint on the canvas, both in application and depiction.
When one looks at the
range of works on exhibit here, one is aware of the initial early figurative
works in standard portrait realizations, but the figurative would inevitably
find its iteration in the styles in which he was immersed.
Indeed, the self portrait seen here seems
precipitantly determined to verge into the abstract at earliest opportunity.
Self-Portrait,
n.d., oil on canvas, 20 x 18 inches. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
The figurative was
amazingly rendered in the Cubist Paris works, as in this classic Mother and
Child depiction.
His niece has pointed
out that there are some later works that seem most abstract, but in a lapse of
disclosure, were revealed to be portraits of self and friend, although with
only lines and arabesques rendering the human presence.
Thus, when mention of
figurative elements is suggested in some of the work, a particular human
connection is ignited in depiction and reflection, although it is also present
on an emotional level throughout the prism of his art. It is also
important to note his engagement with other art forms that have a predominant
human expression (theater, dance, opera, etc.).
Indeed, as a counter to
any accusation of figurative abandonment or representational disability (often
projected on artists of this category), he periodically painted fully representational
works, often noting the life-sized Venus de Milo he had painted in a faux fresco on the wall of
the dining room in his apartment.
When the potential of
figurative presence enters consideration of the paintings, this energizes our
exploration, but again the creative nexus here is inevitable in the undeniable
emotional connection with the paint, the line and the physical existence of the
paint itself with a physical tangibility that has emotional inherence that
merges subject, act and medium.
In one of his major
works in this exhibition, that at first seems to lack the cohesion and total
organization seen in his other works, one’s perception quickly changes with the
intimation of the figurative, when confronted with the startling possibility of
the presence of a nude figuration in all of its reverberating intensity
galvanized in the central force field in front of us.
Untitled,
1986, oil on linen, 42 x 60 inches. Collection of Alan Feinsilver
At first it may seem a
stretch, perhaps, although with awareness of colors familiar from one of his
representational figurative views, association begins to lock in.
Nude,
n.d., oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches. Collection of Alan Feinsilve
The tripartite
organization of the painting with this figurative dimension generates a
correspondence from the realm of art history (which Marcus explored as a
teacher and theoretician), presenting an inescapable possibility that this work
may be a Cubist/Abstractionist variant of an iconic classical representation
with tripartite organization, a correspondence that would render this work
especially provocative and enigmatic.
“The Birth
of Venus,”
by Sandro Botticelli, 1485, 67.9 x 109.6 inches. Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Untitled, 1986, oil on linen,
42 x 60 inches. Collection of Alan Feinsilve
The presence of
figurative, portrait and personal reference elements that are suggested in his
work also appear in the works of a range of contemporary artists from de
Kooning to Passlof to Rauschenberg.
This intense personal
engagement with the work, of course, was not alien to his contemporaries, for
in their personal engagements with the execution of their work, an emotional
expression was communicated that also reflected the world and times in which
they lived. In the works of some of the
most intuitive artists of the period one feels what was in the atmosphere at
the time, and this energy was then transferred and conferred on the canvas
through the richness and diversity of the palette and the power and intensity
of the application.
Marcus is exceptional
here as the multi-leveled aspects of his work do reflect and connect in an
awesome way, especially if one steps back to consider that this life in art
tells us in a most personal way what he, his contemporaries and we who shared
the same times and places have experienced.
Although very
controlled, there is also a private emotional intensity embedded in some of the
rigorous lines and gestures that crossed and layered the canvas. Certainly, the
vivid eruption of the personal and the private, as well as reconnections with
the world and others, would all be present in the work, and here we see it most
powerfully, perhaps because it is so private and not encumbered by any constraints
of public confrontation, but a dedicated journey in the personal and public
worlds in which he lived, and now those times and that life live forever in
these works.
No wonder that during
his lifetime, the process of art and its embedded interactions were so personal
that verbalization would be an intrusion into the complex world of dense
emotional nodes and arabesques, and sweeping bent arcs of force.
When one sees these
paintings in collection, as here, and in lines of walled installation, the panorama
of his achievement appears, for we see the entire continuum of this artist’s
life and work.
The continuum here is
deeply personal, with explorations, associations, pentimenti and memories
poured onto the playing field of the canvas, perhaps unintended for further
direct revelation, a record of a life in engagement with the paint and the
forces that generated the canvascape that would be a mirror and a window into
the realm where creation resides and from which it bursts forth.
It is also, in its
informed renderings of pathways of expression, a document of time resident,
densely and fully crowded with the sounds and sights of an era, which
challenges our range of confrontation with forces revealed through the medium
that is paint.
Personal references and
multilayered vestiges of experiences also appear in the collages (as they do in
works by Rauschenberg and other
contemporaries), where the ephemeral materials
from his travels are embedded in multilayered accumulation in collagial
organization.
Untitled,
n.d., mixed media collage, 9.5 x 11.5 inches
Collection of Alan Feinsilver
In Zola Marcus’
work (as in that of many Black Mountain
College figures) we see the larger connectives in the realm of art that some
historians seem to latch too narrowly in dismissing the density of human experience, the presence of larger
communities of artists and the
confluence of human exploration that was
particularly innovative at Black
Mountain College during the time of its existence and in its reverberating
models and acculturations that have continued on in expanding references and
revelations.
The rediscovery here is
most fortunate in the active participation of his niece, Julie Feinsilver, his
nephew, Alan Feinsilver, and his friend, the distinguished James H. Ottaway
Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics, Garry L. Hagberg, who have contributed
to the creation of the catalog for the exhibition, with its essential, critical
insights, and, at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center, the intuitive
and illuminating curation of Alice Sebrell and Connie Bostic.
Interaction,
n.d., oil on linen, 22 x 22 inches. Collection of Julie Feinsilver
In the end, this
exhibition achieves what any major exhibition does: urges us to explore and
discover more of the artist and his work.
All Artwork Copyright Estate of Zola Marcus
All Artwork Copyright Estate of Zola Marcus
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