Essays
John Himmelfarb Multidimensional, Susan Aurinko, Curator, August 2007
A Circulating Library
H.F. Johnson Gallery of Art
October 15 -17, 2009
Exhibition Catalog
Essay for Inland Romance
Oakton Community College William A. Koehnline Gallery, 2001
Revelation Through Concealment:the
Elusive Nature of John Himmelfarb’s Prints
John Brunetti, January 2000
Drawing Through
Writing/Writing Through Drawing:the Gestalt of John Himmelfarb’s
Prints John Brunetti, June 1999
Tracking the
Backtracker: John Himmelfarb in the Garden
Michael Bonesteel, 1989-90
Exhibition Catalog Essay: Meetings
in the Garden
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, 1989-1990
Tracking the Backtracker: John Himmelfarb in the Garden
Michael Bonesteel
The wooded area where John Himmelfarb grew up in Winfield, Ill., had a profound effect on the artist’s work. In that tangle of branches and leaves—and critters moving about within it—Himmelfarb found a primal source for imagery that would turn up again and again as a leitmotif in his compositions. Whether abstract, figurative or some mysteriously ambiguous place in between, his subject matter continuously threatens to revert back to nature, as if the artist were merely a gardener tending a temporary landscape that might turn wild and savage the minute he turns his back.
“Meetings in the Garden” is an apt title for the present exhibition, not only because it refers to Himmelfarb’s most prominent body of work, but because it really can be applied to the artist’s entire oeuvre. Long before the two Titans confronted each other and the toothsome hound in the forest, Himmelfarb was creating a variety of pictures with many of the same elements in them: verdant surfaces and, when present, odd, quizzical figures.
Like the aesthetic woodsman that he is, we find him backtracking throughout his career, moving forward into new territory, then retreating to an old trail; blazing that one a bit further, then returning to the first path any number of years later.
What the artist is stalking is generally unknown, even to himself. Early on, his only philosophy was to make a mark and react to it. Today he know a bit more about what he wants to do beforehand, but once he starts (and this, naturally, is true of most artists), he’s never quite sure where he’ll end up.
Upon examining the numerous directions in which Himmelfarb has taken his art, one is struck by the variety of work and the versatility of the artist. Contrary to the laws of the artistic jungle, he refused, as a young artist, to search out and secure a bankable signature style. Instead, he experimented, changed his mind, took up new routes in completely unpredictable ways, exploring one idea after another.
It wasn’t until the mid-’80s, as the artist approached mid-career, that he coame upon a theme that was to hold and challenge his, by now, virtuosic capabilities. With the “Meeting” series, he pulled out the stops backtracking over the same fertile terrain, employing the many facets of his skill—facets that may recall his greatest inspirations (expressionism a la Appel, abstract expressionism a la de Kooning, surrealistic classicism a la Picasso, art brut a la Dubuffet), but inspirations recombined and transformed into Himmelfarb originals.
A 1971 lithograph like “Ether Ore” is basically an orchestrated jumble of doodlings, and yet, however abstract, it appears to be something. Certainly it’s organic; perhaps a topographical view of a jungle or a slice of mud on a microscope slide. The punning title indicates that it is a precious component of a transcendent dimension. Moving ahead 11 years to an acrylic painting such as “Spring Green,” we find the artist has developed a more lyrical style and his vocabulary has become richer, more voluptuous. And yet there is the same feeling of looking at essentially nothing that appears to be something—like thick tendrils and floppy leaves, maybe. Or maybe just a bunch of non-representational designs.
Looking at two other examples, there is the 1975 four-color lithograph, “Home,” and the 1988 monoprint, “Sunlight Dialogue.” “Home” looks for all the world like an all-over scribble pattern of aimless marks, a sort of compulsive Cy Twombly without a break. Only the occasional and seemingly random appearance of a recognizable image—a face or a house—breaks up the piece. “Sunlight Dialogue,” executed 13 years later, utilizes a similar approach. Again we have a four-color composition, each color represented by a mark, but here the marks are thicker, more expressionistic. Nothing figurative can be absolutely pinpointed, but with a little imagination, the viewer can easily fabricate a face or some other form out of the controlled thicket of brush strokes.
In both of these comparisons, Himmelfarb has created a contemporary work by backtracking, consciously or unconsciously, to a previous work and picking up where he left off with an approach that is ostensibly abstract, but figuratively teasing.
From 1976 to the early ‘80s, Himmelfarb experimented with grids in his drawings and prints. The grid idea originally grew out of a need to solve the problem of making large-scale prints in two sections without betraying the dividing line. By breaking up his image into columns or grids, he could disguise the break that divided the piece.
He eventually became so enamored of the grid approach that he began making drawings of densely inscribed bars or rectangle with little or no white space between them. The spaces gradually became more pronounced and, at the same time, the abstract markings within the bars and rectanges began to reveal figurative elements. In a work called “Early Riser” (1977), he pushed the grid pattern into outright cartoon panels—closed frames around figurative line drawings. The cartoons don’t really tell a story, but certain figurative shapes reappear, sometimes extending into the surrounding panels adjacent to it on all four sides.
In 1979, he made a foray into the realm of “bad” art with a piece called “Where Have I Been?”—as well as a brief exploration of a spare, almost minimalist approach in a continuous line drawing titled “A Peep into the 20th Century.” Still, before the year was out, he had backtracked to his dense grid pieces with a work called “Elements.” He also would backtrack to his “bad” art phase with “Physical” (1983), as well as to his spare line drawing approach in “Tell Tale Tall Tale” (1984).
The year 1982 was a momentous one for Himmelfarb as he settled on several themes that were to occupy him for the rest of the decade. “Bone” (1982) is a rather remarkable lithograph picturing two figures, presumably a man and a dog. Both are so elaborately decorated with patterns and details in a manner reminiscent of the so-called “personnages” by the artist Maryan, that it is difficult to decipher, yet it’s fairly clear that the creature with the gritted square teeth is throwing a bone to the other creature with the sharp, pointed teeth. That same year, he completed “Meeting,” a brush and ink piece which depicts another man and dog, and the profile of a third figure hidden in the undergrowth. He would later return to these pieces as models for his “Meeting” series, but first he would complete his “Boat Man” series begun the previous year.
The “Boat Man” works are less expressionistic and more cartoonish in execution. They show a man in a boat weighed down by hundreds of personal possessions, to the degree that the boat sinks and, ultimately, so does the man. This rather grim scenario gave way to a more subtle enigmatic one with the “Meeting” series.
When Himmelfarb backtracked to the “Meeting” drawing in 1984, he simply felt that it was a strong composition that he wanted to elaborate upon. Like “Meeting,” “Two Heads” (1984) contains the same full-faced and profiled heads, plus a dog (and one or two birds). The composition is a little clearer since Himmelfarb dispensed with most of the background foliage. After that, he made “September Meeting” (1984) which developed the three characters further by giving them the kind of full-lipped, bug-eyed demeanor that they came to possess in later renditions. A slight hint of Picasso is introduced in “September Meeting” as well: the full-faced figure on the left has a double mouth which is sort of split in half, like Picasso’s dual profile/full-faced portrait of Marie-Therese Walter (“Girl Before Mirror”). Moreover, both heads have a kind of man/beast quality, a larger-than-life machismo redolent of Picasso’s pen and ink drawings of bulls, matadors, horses and women in the 1930s.
With each new “Meeting” painting, the figures take on added significance. In “April Meeting” (1985), Himmelfarb includes a rendering of his own hand with a brush working on the scene. As the series continues, the full face looms larger, crowding out the profiled face and dog; or the full face and profile reverse positions (but the dog always faces the profiled face). Sometimes there are two full faces alone or just a full face and a dog. Most recently, the full face has been pictured by itself, but with that curious Picassoesque dual full-face/profile.
Some of the works are very large, such as “Giants Meetings” (1985). One panoramic piece, “Meeting in the Attic” (1986), takes up an entire wall. Various mediums are tried: acrylic and oil paintings, monoprints, etchings, woodcuts, even cast bronze reliefs. Midway through the series, black and white are abandoned for a number of daring color experiments. “Lava Flow” (1986) is an aquatint etching of two heads in red and black that actually resemble rivulets of burning lava against black volcanic ash. “Sexuality Meets Aggression” (1987), depicting a man and a dog, fairly bursts with manic shapes and high intensity red, yellow and green colors, while the three familar figures in “Listening In” (1986) are expressed in such calm, cool blues and aquas that it reminds one of an underwater mosaic.
Himmelfarb may have been backtracking over the same ground, but he was doing more than just rearranging figures and adding new colors. The very fiber of his compositions changed year by year. In 1984, figure and foliage are one organic entity, lips are leaves, and eyes are knot-holes. By 1986, the figural forms have hardened into gnarled grains of cracked, aged wood. Then suddenly (with “Lava Flow”) they become liquid, melting coagulating, waxen and undulating; or (in “Listening In”) crystalized into chips of inlaid stone. In 1987, the forms catch fire and break into sharp, glassy shards. And so it goes.
What was it about this tableau that obsessed Himmelfarb for so many years? The artist has mentioned an interest in playing around with dualities: black vs. white; figuration vs. abstraction; profile vs. full face; whole personality vs. parts. The dog adds another duality—man vs. beast. If one includes the vegetation, there is a fourth element to contend with. Himmelfarb admits that he tends to identify with the figures and sees them, at least subconsciously, as self-portraits. Some, he confesses, remind him of his father.
The late Samuel Himmelfarb also was an artist. Not unlike his son, Samuel moved between abstraction and figuration in his work. He had a studio on Chicago’s Halsted Street and John first began seriously making art in a corner of that studio. They even exhibited together. John’s mother, Eleanor Himmelfarb, is an artist as well. Like both her husband’s and son’s, her work straddles abstraction and figuration. More telling, her work emphasizes the relationship between man and nature.
There’s no point trying to look for Himmelfarb in his work—or for that matter, his parents, the dogs he grew up with, or the woods he roamed in his childhood. Nevertheless, they’re all there. One might just as well search for them in his latest series of abstract works titled, appropriately, “Non-Objective.” Here the same veil is thrown across the landscape that we encountered in “Ether Ore” and “Spring Green.” Nothing is strictly identifiable. Except, of course, the methods of the artist, backtracking in the garden again.
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, 1989-1990
Tracking the Backtracker: John Himmelfarb in the Garden
Michael Bonesteel
The wooded area where John Himmelfarb grew up in Winfield, Ill., had a profound effect on the artist’s work. In that tangle of branches and leaves—and critters moving about within it—Himmelfarb found a primal source for imagery that would turn up again and again as a leitmotif in his compositions. Whether abstract, figurative or some mysteriously ambiguous place in between, his subject matter continuously threatens to revert back to nature, as if the artist were merely a gardener tending a temporary landscape that might turn wild and savage the minute he turns his back.
“Meetings in the Garden” is an apt title for the present exhibition, not only because it refers to Himmelfarb’s most prominent body of work, but because it really can be applied to the artist’s entire oeuvre. Long before the two Titans confronted each other and the toothsome hound in the forest, Himmelfarb was creating a variety of pictures with many of the same elements in them: verdant surfaces and, when present, odd, quizzical figures.
Like the aesthetic woodsman that he is, we find him backtracking throughout his career, moving forward into new territory, then retreating to an old trail; blazing that one a bit further, then returning to the first path any number of years later.
What the artist is stalking is generally unknown, even to himself. Early on, his only philosophy was to make a mark and react to it. Today he know a bit more about what he wants to do beforehand, but once he starts (and this, naturally, is true of most artists), he’s never quite sure where he’ll end up.
Upon examining the numerous directions in which Himmelfarb has taken his art, one is struck by the variety of work and the versatility of the artist. Contrary to the laws of the artistic jungle, he refused, as a young artist, to search out and secure a bankable signature style. Instead, he experimented, changed his mind, took up new routes in completely unpredictable ways, exploring one idea after another.
It wasn’t until the mid-’80s, as the artist approached mid-career, that he coame upon a theme that was to hold and challenge his, by now, virtuosic capabilities. With the “Meeting” series, he pulled out the stops backtracking over the same fertile terrain, employing the many facets of his skill—facets that may recall his greatest inspirations (expressionism a la Appel, abstract expressionism a la de Kooning, surrealistic classicism a la Picasso, art brut a la Dubuffet), but inspirations recombined and transformed into Himmelfarb originals.
A 1971 lithograph like “Ether Ore” is basically an orchestrated jumble of doodlings, and yet, however abstract, it appears to be something. Certainly it’s organic; perhaps a topographical view of a jungle or a slice of mud on a microscope slide. The punning title indicates that it is a precious component of a transcendent dimension. Moving ahead 11 years to an acrylic painting such as “Spring Green,” we find the artist has developed a more lyrical style and his vocabulary has become richer, more voluptuous. And yet there is the same feeling of looking at essentially nothing that appears to be something—like thick tendrils and floppy leaves, maybe. Or maybe just a bunch of non-representational designs.
Looking at two other examples, there is the 1975 four-color lithograph, “Home,” and the 1988 monoprint, “Sunlight Dialogue.” “Home” looks for all the world like an all-over scribble pattern of aimless marks, a sort of compulsive Cy Twombly without a break. Only the occasional and seemingly random appearance of a recognizable image—a face or a house—breaks up the piece. “Sunlight Dialogue,” executed 13 years later, utilizes a similar approach. Again we have a four-color composition, each color represented by a mark, but here the marks are thicker, more expressionistic. Nothing figurative can be absolutely pinpointed, but with a little imagination, the viewer can easily fabricate a face or some other form out of the controlled thicket of brush strokes.
In both of these comparisons, Himmelfarb has created a contemporary work by backtracking, consciously or unconsciously, to a previous work and picking up where he left off with an approach that is ostensibly abstract, but figuratively teasing.
From 1976 to the early ‘80s, Himmelfarb experimented with grids in his drawings and prints. The grid idea originally grew out of a need to solve the problem of making large-scale prints in two sections without betraying the dividing line. By breaking up his image into columns or grids, he could disguise the break that divided the piece.
He eventually became so enamored of the grid approach that he began making drawings of densely inscribed bars or rectangle with little or no white space between them. The spaces gradually became more pronounced and, at the same time, the abstract markings within the bars and rectanges began to reveal figurative elements. In a work called “Early Riser” (1977), he pushed the grid pattern into outright cartoon panels—closed frames around figurative line drawings. The cartoons don’t really tell a story, but certain figurative shapes reappear, sometimes extending into the surrounding panels adjacent to it on all four sides.
In 1979, he made a foray into the realm of “bad” art with a piece called “Where Have I Been?”—as well as a brief exploration of a spare, almost minimalist approach in a continuous line drawing titled “A Peep into the 20th Century.” Still, before the year was out, he had backtracked to his dense grid pieces with a work called “Elements.” He also would backtrack to his “bad” art phase with “Physical” (1983), as well as to his spare line drawing approach in “Tell Tale Tall Tale” (1984).
The year 1982 was a momentous one for Himmelfarb as he settled on several themes that were to occupy him for the rest of the decade. “Bone” (1982) is a rather remarkable lithograph picturing two figures, presumably a man and a dog. Both are so elaborately decorated with patterns and details in a manner reminiscent of the so-called “personnages” by the artist Maryan, that it is difficult to decipher, yet it’s fairly clear that the creature with the gritted square teeth is throwing a bone to the other creature with the sharp, pointed teeth. That same year, he completed “Meeting,” a brush and ink piece which depicts another man and dog, and the profile of a third figure hidden in the undergrowth. He would later return to these pieces as models for his “Meeting” series, but first he would complete his “Boat Man” series begun the previous year.
The “Boat Man” works are less expressionistic and more cartoonish in execution. They show a man in a boat weighed down by hundreds of personal possessions, to the degree that the boat sinks and, ultimately, so does the man. This rather grim scenario gave way to a more subtle enigmatic one with the “Meeting” series.
When Himmelfarb backtracked to the “Meeting” drawing in 1984, he simply felt that it was a strong composition that he wanted to elaborate upon. Like “Meeting,” “Two Heads” (1984) contains the same full-faced and profiled heads, plus a dog (and one or two birds). The composition is a little clearer since Himmelfarb dispensed with most of the background foliage. After that, he made “September Meeting” (1984) which developed the three characters further by giving them the kind of full-lipped, bug-eyed demeanor that they came to possess in later renditions. A slight hint of Picasso is introduced in “September Meeting” as well: the full-faced figure on the left has a double mouth which is sort of split in half, like Picasso’s dual profile/full-faced portrait of Marie-Therese Walter (“Girl Before Mirror”). Moreover, both heads have a kind of man/beast quality, a larger-than-life machismo redolent of Picasso’s pen and ink drawings of bulls, matadors, horses and women in the 1930s.
With each new “Meeting” painting, the figures take on added significance. In “April Meeting” (1985), Himmelfarb includes a rendering of his own hand with a brush working on the scene. As the series continues, the full face looms larger, crowding out the profiled face and dog; or the full face and profile reverse positions (but the dog always faces the profiled face). Sometimes there are two full faces alone or just a full face and a dog. Most recently, the full face has been pictured by itself, but with that curious Picassoesque dual full-face/profile.
Some of the works are very large, such as “Giants Meetings” (1985). One panoramic piece, “Meeting in the Attic” (1986), takes up an entire wall. Various mediums are tried: acrylic and oil paintings, monoprints, etchings, woodcuts, even cast bronze reliefs. Midway through the series, black and white are abandoned for a number of daring color experiments. “Lava Flow” (1986) is an aquatint etching of two heads in red and black that actually resemble rivulets of burning lava against black volcanic ash. “Sexuality Meets Aggression” (1987), depicting a man and a dog, fairly bursts with manic shapes and high intensity red, yellow and green colors, while the three familar figures in “Listening In” (1986) are expressed in such calm, cool blues and aquas that it reminds one of an underwater mosaic.
Himmelfarb may have been backtracking over the same ground, but he was doing more than just rearranging figures and adding new colors. The very fiber of his compositions changed year by year. In 1984, figure and foliage are one organic entity, lips are leaves, and eyes are knot-holes. By 1986, the figural forms have hardened into gnarled grains of cracked, aged wood. Then suddenly (with “Lava Flow”) they become liquid, melting coagulating, waxen and undulating; or (in “Listening In”) crystalized into chips of inlaid stone. In 1987, the forms catch fire and break into sharp, glassy shards. And so it goes.
What was it about this tableau that obsessed Himmelfarb for so many years? The artist has mentioned an interest in playing around with dualities: black vs. white; figuration vs. abstraction; profile vs. full face; whole personality vs. parts. The dog adds another duality—man vs. beast. If one includes the vegetation, there is a fourth element to contend with. Himmelfarb admits that he tends to identify with the figures and sees them, at least subconsciously, as self-portraits. Some, he confesses, remind him of his father.
The late Samuel Himmelfarb also was an artist. Not unlike his son, Samuel moved between abstraction and figuration in his work. He had a studio on Chicago’s Halsted Street and John first began seriously making art in a corner of that studio. They even exhibited together. John’s mother, Eleanor Himmelfarb, is an artist as well. Like both her husband’s and son’s, her work straddles abstraction and figuration. More telling, her work emphasizes the relationship between man and nature.
There’s no point trying to look for Himmelfarb in his work—or for that matter, his parents, the dogs he grew up with, or the woods he roamed in his childhood. Nevertheless, they’re all there. One might just as well search for them in his latest series of abstract works titled, appropriately, “Non-Objective.” Here the same veil is thrown across the landscape that we encountered in “Ether Ore” and “Spring Green.” Nothing is strictly identifiable. Except, of course, the methods of the artist, backtracking in the garden again.