interview

George Meet John Paul

Bradley Rubenstein — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 18:36:18 +0000

George Meet John Paul Bradley Rubenstein June 9, 2019 - 14:36

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A conversation between George Lloyd and John Paul, (MFA Yale 1969) Concerning Knox Martin's show at Hollis Taggart Gallery, June 3, 2019.

John Paul: When Gabriela Ryan asked me to write something about Knox's recent show at Hollis Taggart Gallery, I was watching a tv program about Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley. I let the picture run through our conversation, fascinated by the timeline of the legendary frontier showman and his shooting starlet. I felt no distracting contradiction. For us, the life and times of Cody are less legendary than the era of our painting heroes -- those decades in an emptier and less crowded New York when DeKooning, Gorky, Kline, Ilya Bolotowsky and Knox Martin were staking a claim for a viable language in painting. We can add many others -- fanning out into New England and Maine. Will Barnet, Jack Tworkov, Hans Hoffman, even Provincetown's Edwin Dickinson. Knox’s involvement in the New York School of painting is well documented. He was friends with DeKooning and Kline (although not with Gorky personally). Knox was also happy to know his Washington Heights neighbor Elias Goldberg (AKA the Pissarro of Washington Heights) and is deeply moved by these physically modest works in oil and watercolor -- in ways that derive from Cezanne. Knox has no prejudice about size in art.

George Llyod: I write at a disadvantage, unable to view these pictures in person. Nevertheless, I'll do my best based on the exhibit catalog and images available online.

JP: You are the right person to handle the challenge. There aren't many others in our class who kept up drawing in structures as you have. You also inherited a deep respect for architecture and concept drawing from your father. To continue, the show at Hollis Taggart is aptly titled Radical Structures. The analysis and underlying geometry in art is a Knox Martin phenomenon. No one else was discussing art on this level, or working on it openly.

GL: That's right. In our drawing class Knox would take out a big reproduction of a Franz Hals and trace the linear structure. Some of the students would doze off, but for me it was an eye-opener.

JP: Just recently, Knox, his daughter Olivia, and another friend, were at the Met Breuer for the show "Unfinished." There was an El Greco and other old masters, but the big occasion was Titian's "The Flaying Of Marsyas." Knox took out his laser pen light and rapidly traced for us, the subtle underlying geometry, the circulating activation of form.

Given that the viewer's need to wander and be directed, Titian knew how to create an experience using the myth as a point of departure. The act of composition can bring an acute and sometimes unnerving realization on other levels of perception, on the empathy level. Anyway, Knox's clear and unrestrained voice, and the light pen tracings on the sixteenth century surface, created havoc in the museum. Guards and eventually the head curator had to shut down this wonderful moment -- but it was too late: the mission was already accomplished.

GL: The impression I have from Rubber Soul [diptych 1963] is one of bright and buoyant forms, gliding effortlessly across the viewer's field of vision. The effect is analogous to that of a summer's day, or maybe that of a day dream in fortuitous conjunction with delectable sensations of color and surface. In contrast to some of his more Minimalist contemporaries who applied paint to canvas in a more mechanical and less nuanced fashion, Knox does not shirk from indulgence in the more sensual possibilities inherent in the paint medium. So while on one level, Knox may seem to pull out all the stops, on another he works within a very limited set of strictures, employing classic oppositions like arcs and straight lines, circles and squares .

JP: There are these tilted and interrupted patterns of dots, that intersect, compete for the foreground then recede to an unseen periphery. He references Islamic and Persian art -- and pattern that predates by centuries the Op Art of the sixties.

Rubber Soul [diptych 1963]

GL: I would be remiss not to reference the critical role of movement and gesture in these pictures. In She [1963-5 ], a sense of high drama is provoked by the playful actions of shapes and forms upon each other in a matrix of shallow depth. Historical antecedent here would be early 20^th century Synthetic Cubist collage. Another essential component of Knox's painting process might well be referred to as "Body English." In this way, the presence of the "Hero Shape Shifter" that Knox would frequently refer to in his classroom lectures in New Haven is never far away. For Knox, it would seem that a sense of the lurking presence of the man who made them would be critical to the effect of his pictures upon the viewer who encounters them.

JP: The sense of affirmation, exploded by DeKooning and Picasso, and the concealment power of Matisse (alive and kicking in those days, but in very different ways) is inescapable. Let's not forget that the painter as well as the painting in this show had an extraordinary physicality and confidence. Then Knox was doing many things of personal interest: martial arts, sculpture, magic, dagger throwing, and piloting a small plane. Artist friends would talk of his exploits, but that was beside the point. He was his own man in art. Seeing these paintings in a retrospective show, from his and our youth, revives those memories. And he is still making powerful things happen on the canvas.

GL: The years just after World War 2, when Knox studied at the League with Will Barnet, would have coincided with Will's Indian Space period. Not a big stretch to find a parallel between the flat patterned surfaces of Will's Indian Space pictures and the kind of surface arabesques which are so characteristic of Knox .

JP: I'm glad you mentioned the shape-juxtaposing clarity of Barnet. Will spoke about the excitement of designing a plan for the painting to contain itself, to reinforce the picture narrative with an underlying structure. Not just an expedient, but a solution to a puzzle, a personal icon perhaps. Not letting everything drift or leak out the edges.

BL: It would also be relevant to note that Will Barnet, who was born near to Boston in 1911, was a lifelong admirer of the great mural cycle by Puvis de Chavannes which had been installed in the grand staircase of the Boston Public Library just a decade or so prior to Will's birth. In Barnet's opinion, which I had directly from him, Puvis was a proto-Modern. According to Will, the French muralist's deep respect for the wall surfaces which his paintings occupied was directly related to Modernist notions about flatness and the integrity of the picture surface.

That Puvis was a Symbolist and a painter of dreams might well serve to open up another path not only to Barnet's Indian Space pictures but also to Knox, who was never one to refrain from poetic allusion in his painting. Modernist concerns for material values and a consequent reverence for the painting as a physical object in and of itself did not, for Knox, ever present a barrier to dreaming. Even in a painting as ostensibly reduced to abstraction as SHE, it is the female figure which is found to be the pivot of inspiration for the artist in question.

JP: In this show the elegant weights and balances of the paint bodies remind us of his physical daring and audacity. But getting back to Yale in the sixties -- looking back on Knox's drawing class, when we were students, Knox was more than a responsible teacher: he was a lightning rod of empowerment. His drawing classes in the Yale program were listed in the curriculum with action-inspiring titles: Super Creator 1 and 2. We were learning to find ways to achieve "activation." Drawing needed to be tensed and interactive in its parts like a perpetual motion machine. I know I simplify, and axioms are useless without demonstration. But without Knox in my history, much of the excellent education I had in art academies would fade, or worse, stumble in repetition of a format. His knowledge of art history, literature, philosophy, religions, astronomy and the natural universe sustained our encounters with the blank page, the empty white canvas.

GL: And for Knox it could be a white page of paper or a city wall! The same thing.

Woman With Bicycle, Mural on Houston Street, NYC

JP: Yes, Knox also painted major public murals. I especially marvelled at the Venus mural on West Street and the Woman With Bicycle (above) on Houston Street. They were fixtures of my adopted city. I would look up at these on a daily basis. In recent years we have discussed murals, when I was licensed to paint outdoor ads and murals. He told me those walls existed for him as works in themselves: not as publicity to promote his status in the art world. Richard Haas, the architect, made many forgettable outdoor walls. They were academic. Knox's walls were fun and came out of a virile sense of humor. I miss seeing them up there.

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François Ozon on Frantz, Sex and Death, and Hitchcock's Rebecca

Brandon Judell — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 14:00:00 +0000

François Ozon on Frantz, Sex and Death, and Hitchcock's Rebecca Brandon Judell March 20, 2017 - 10:00

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"Awards are like hemorrhoids. Sooner or later every asshole gets one," François Ozon, one of France's most prolific director/screenwriters, has noted.

With Frantz, his pacifistic, feminist, and slightly homoerotic chronicling of a post-World War I love affair of sorts opening Stateside this week, he can say that with a smile. After all, this feature has already garnered eleven Cécar nominations, including one for best film, and a dozen more from various international film festivals.

For many folks, that's no surprise. All they have to hear is that a new Ozon is unspooling at their local art house, and they’re hotfooting it to the ticket booth. Why? Few other directors have the ability to depict the psychosexual permutations of our fellow man better, at times accompanied with an unexpected Hitchcockian twist or a good dose of Almodóvarian tongue-in-cheek perversity.

In his 1996 short, "A Summer Dress," a young gay man, after being seduced by a female tourist in the woods, finds his clothing has been stolen, and he has to bicycle home in a spare dress of his seductress. A piece of cotton fabric has seldom transformed a life more. The nightmarish See the Sea (1997) showcases a temperamentally disinclined-to-chatter hitchhiker, who pitches her tent on an isolated property housing a sweet mother and her tot. You’ll never look at a toothbrush with a lack of wariness again. (By the way, The New York Times critiqued the latter as "exquisitely unsettling.")

Sitcom (1998) comically crucifies a suburban bourgeois family while Criminal Lovers (1999) is sort of an oddly twisted take on Hansel and Gretel, where Gretel is kept in the basement and Hansel is chained to the upstairs bed to service the witch, or in this case a hunter. And so forth and so on, nearly every year, with a Woody-Allenesque relentlessness, another Ozon is released and welcomed, including the Fassbender adaptation (Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000)), the all-female murder musical with Catherine Deneuve (Eight Women (2002)), and the tale of a well-off 17-year-old who secretly becomes a prostitute for the “fun” of it (Young & Beautiful(2013)).

Now arrives the aforementioned Frantz, an adaptation of L'homme que j'ai tué, a play by Maurice Rostand, the son of Edmund (Cyrano de Bergeracwhich was first filmed in 1931 by Ernst Lubitsch as Broken Lullaby.

As this melodrama begins, the war is over with millions dead, including Frantz. In the small town of Quedlinburg, the elderly parents of the soldier and his fiancée, Anna (Paula) Beer, who lives with them, still mourn over their loss at an empty grave. Frantz’s body was never returned from the battlefield.

One day Anna sees a stranger at the cemetery grieving by her lover’s tombstone. Who is he, and why is he there every day. Asking about, she discovers he’s French. And when he shows up at the home of Frantz, she discovers he’s Adrien (Pierre Niney), an old friend of Frantz’s, who knew him from Paris. The young men went to the museum together. They both played the violin. They both . . . .

Slowly, the family's wariness subsides, and it accepts Adrien into its inner circle as he entertains and heals with reminiscences of his and his pal’s bygone days, but . . . . To say more would be unfair. Frantz rolls out one surprise after another, raising expectations, then belying them. Here love intermingles with odium as you view the citizens of both Germany and France getting more nationalistic and unconsciously laying the groundwork for World War II. Can true affection root itself in such a foundation? And do Anna and Adrien even understand who is really the object of their warm feelings? To state more would almost be like revealing the pants-dropping moment in The Crying Game or that a ship sinks in Titanic. Well, that might be pushing it a bit.

Anyway, let's move on to sex and death, a near constant in the Ozon oeuvre. In The New Girlfriend, for example, after her childhood girlfriend dies, a woman eventually realizes she loved her deceased pal in a lesbianic fashion, which she now acts out with the dead woman’s husband who dresses in drag, making believe he is his ex-wife.

In Young & Beautiful, the aforementioned teenage hooker/student realizes a form of love for a much older john who dies mid-copulation within her. And so on and so forth.

Now here in Frantz, an amour connection begins again at the sounding of the death knell.

To find out why, I met up with the visually striking Ozon on one chilly New York City afternoon in his suite at the Le Parker Meridien, not far from Central Park. I asked: "Once again you combine death and sexuality in such a way that they transform lives. Most people do not think about sex and death simultaneously. We, in fact, often try to kick Death off the mattress. Can you explain the connection?"

"It's a big question," he responded. "I once made a short film when I was young called 'A Little Death.' I don't think it means the same thing in English and French. 'A little death' means 'orgasm' in French.'"

"Really."

"You don’t say 'a little death' when you orgasm?" Ozon queried in a shocked manner.

"No, I don't think so. Possibly we say it when we don't get aroused."

"So it means nothing to you. For us, when you have a little death you orgasm."

"Ah, it sounds very Buddhist."

Ozone responds by giving away the film's plotline so we'll skip that chatter.

"The playwright Maurice Rostand was sort of a famous homosexual at the time," I note.

"He lived with his mother."

"Ah," I say. "Freud would have expected that. Because you knew Rostand was gay, is that why you expanded the homosexual subtext of the play?"

"No, I didn’t know about Maurice. . . . He was not a great writer. He was a socialite, but he was a pacifist like any intellectual after the First World War, and his play was very successful in France, but I didn't discover he was gay. This I wasn't aware of. We don't know if he had some affair, but he was like a queen. Do you say that? He was a figure of the thirties."

"He also wrote about Oscar Wilde," I add, reciting a factoid from Wikipedia.

"Yes," the director nods.

"If you had been born 20 to 30 years earlier, you might not have been able to include the homosexuality or homoerotica that's part and parcel of many of your films. Do you ever ponder that? Or do you ever look back at your favorite directors and think if they had been born now, they would have changed everything they did?"

Ozon smiles, "I don’t know, but I would have loved to have worked in the thirties and forties in Hollywood with all of the directors I adore, like all of the Germans such as Lubitsch, such as Billy Wilder, such as Hitchcock, who was English, such as all the Europeans who came to Hollywood. They came and made the best films. When you see their films today, they were able to deal with all of these feelings. I saw some days ago Rebecca, the Hitchcock film made in the forties, and it's all about homosexuality, too. I think it was another way of telling the story, but it was possible because they were clever and perverse enough to be able to say very important things about sexuality."

"You were once called a wunderkind," I recall.

"No more."

"On imdb.com, there's a list someone composed that's titled the "Top Directors of All Time" that includes you along with Carl Dreyer, Stanley Kubrick, and Pier Pasolini. Do you believe it when people say you are so wonderful?"

"What is the question?"

"How do you react when people say you're one of the top directors?"

"They don't say that to me in France actually," Ozone laughs.

"Really? They like Jerry Lewis better than you?"

"I'm sure. I'm sure. I like Jerry Lewis, too. Some of his films are very good, but I don't care for honors. Prizes. For me what is important is to make movies, to have the freedom to make a film a year if I want, and to go in different directions. What is important is to have enough success to make the next film. I don’t look at the past, and I don't really care obviously."