Painting in Italy 1961-1969
Marcia Hafif in conversation with Josselyne Naef and Sophie Costes
(excerpt, p. 19-20)
1.
Late in 1961 I planned a year-long trip to Italy to visit
Florence and other Italian Renaissance cities to see the
painting and sculpture I had recently studied – at least
one year, because I intended to continue painting and to
visit other European countries as well. I left Los Angeles
having studied a little Italian but knowing very little about
contemporary art in Italy.
Having packed paper, black pencils and oil pastel crayons
in my bag, along with clothes for a year, I drew in my hotel
room in New York, on the ship (the Cristoforo Colombo),
in a pensione in Naples, in a hotel in Rome. I worked
with the symmetric images I had developed in California,
usually intense color pastels dissolved on paper and drawn
through with black pencil.
I did go to Florence to visit the paintings and the city I
wanted to see, but passing first through Rome, I fell in love
with that city – despite the Baroque architecture, which
compared badly, to me, with the Renaissance art I had
come for – and that was where I chose to live.
I found an apartment in Rome, bought paint materials
– oil and brushes – ordered canvases and began to paint,
ignoring the fact that this accumulation of material things
would tie me down, making my exploration of “Europe”
difficult. But I settled in, bought an Italian cookbook,
shopped for food, went to the movies, read newspapers and
through all this, plus attempts at conversation, I learned to
speak and read and understand Italian.
The first oil paintings were variations on an image I had
used in Los Angeles, a central round disk on a rectangular
canvas, with the corners of the canvas painted out to create
a cross shape. These were executed in oil impasto applied
with a brush and drawn into with a pointed instrument.
2.
It had been the summer of 1960 when I enrolled in one
final painting class. I had grown up and lived for some
years in Claremont, California, painting all through
school, studying with rather traditional figure, still life and
landscape painters, but this class was taught by Richards
Ruben, a painter known for his West Coast Abstract
Expressionism. It was with his encouragement that I
worked my way into abstraction and went on to find my
own imagery. It was through him, too, that I was introduced
to the Los Angeles art scene, specifically the work
and artists around Ferus Gallery, where he and many of
his friends showed.
Ferus, founded by Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholz in the
late ‘50s, and now run by Hopps and Irving Blum, was the
most avant-garde gallery in Los Angeles at that time, and
has gone down in history as such. The artists exhibited there
included Robert Irwin, showing near-monochrome paintings;
Kienholz, with his socially relevant, if sometimes
grisly, three-dimensional assemblages; Billy Al Bengston,
painting symmetrical, emblematic work; and Ken Price,
making ceramic pieces startlingly different from raku,
the Japanese-influenced ceramic work I was familiar
with. From Los Angeles and also San Francisco, there
were John Altoon, Jay De Feo, Sonia Gechtoff, Ed
Moses, Bruce Connor, Peter Voulkos and John Mason,
among others.
Walter (Chico) Hopps occasionally stopped by my
house (I had moved to West Hollywood by then) to
take me along on a visit to an artist he had recently
heard about, or even to a Chicago dealer in town with a
selection of Abstract Expressionist paintings from New
York. Hopps' interests were varied, leading him even then to exhibit Giorgio Morandi, and eventually to
curate at the Pasadena Art Museum the first U.S. retrospective
of Marcel Duchamp.
I made trips to New York in 1959 and again in 1961
to visit galleries and museums, and met a few artists there
: Mark Rothko and Norman Bluhm at an uptown bar,
Franz Kline, who bought me a beer at the legendary
Cedar Bar downtown (Willem de Kooning was said to be
caught up in a row outside). I went to a party at Elaine
de Kooning's loft; it was a smaller scene than what one
would encounter now.
Influenced by my teacher, Ruben, my trips to New York,
and by what I was seeing in Los Angeles, I continued
to experiment with abstraction. During the year I lived
in Los Angeles I reached out from the few near-monochromes
I had painted in Claremont to go on to what I
began to call “concrete” work (as opposed to abstract).
I saw the stretched canvas as an object and began to paint
it as though it were one. The mental imagery Ruben introduced
me to included a new appreciation of Surrealism,
a wider experience of jazz (Dave Brubeck through Miles
Davis and Ornette Coleman), and new directions in literature.
We stopped in at poetry readings at the Gas House
in Venice Beach, saw Beckett and Ionesco plays in Los
Angeles, read Henry Miller and
William Burroughs,
Jean Genet.
Psychotherapy following my divorce led to certain new
imagery in my work, especially in drawings, but also in
painting. My method was to sit before a blank piece of
paper or a stretched and prepared canvas until an image
appeared, projected from my mind onto the empty white
surface. The paintings had begun to be bilaterally symmetric
in 1960 even before I broke my right wrist and
became briefly ambidextrous; that symmetry remained in
my work as long as it evinced a definable image, that is,
throughout the ‘60s.
(...)
