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REVIEW LACMA EXHIBIT ON JOHN ALTOON SHOWS HIS JAZZY, SEDUCTIVE TOUCH
Los Angeles Times
June 11 2014
Christopher Knight
or a brief, shining moment in the 1960s, John Altoon was the great
American painter of the great American sexual revolution.
Voluptuous color and luxurious interpenetrations of sensuous forms
conspired to make messy, elegant, often witty abstract pictures. Their
hedonistic punch is a delicious indulgence.
Altoon's sudden death in 1969 from a heart attack at the age of 43
cut short a promising career. Where he would have gone is of course
impossible to know, but many of his best paintings, made over the
previous seven years, landed in museum collections up and down
California. Today they look as fresh and fine as any from the period.
Many are included among the 18 works on canvas and 50 on paper or
cardboard assembled by curator Carol S. Eliel for the much-anticipated
survey newly opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A prolific
draftsman, Altoon destroyed a considerable number of his paintings,
so the show is a concise overview.
Altoon's interest in the cool, seductive rhythms of West Coast jazz
informed his work.-
Altoon was born in Los Angeles in 1925 of Armenian-immigrant parents
(the family name was Altoonian). Thanks to military service during
World War II and the subsequent GI Bill, he studied commercial
illustration and painting at three area art schools -- Otis, Art Center
and Chouinard. At 26 he moved to New York City and, three years later,
to Europe.
Suffering a psychological breakdown abroad -- Altoon is believed to
have wrestled with schizophrenia or manic depression, which landed
him in the hospital several times -- he returned permanently to Los
Angeles in 1956. Twice married (his first, to Fay Spain, an actress
who mostly worked in television, ended in divorce in 1962), he made
his living teaching and doing commercial work.
The LACMA show opens with a certainly skillful if uninspired painting
of a pair of jazz saxophonists made around 1950. The figures are
rendered in a self-consciously arty style -- call it "mass-market
modern" -- that is a kind of Cubist faceting squashed flat.
Like artists as diverse as David Park in the Bay Area and Wallace
Berman and William Claxton in L.A., however, Altoon's interest in
the cool, seductive rhythms of West Coast jazz informed his work. He
designed album covers for Pacific Jazz Records and other companies,
but the music's reliance on sensual improvisation is what infiltrated
his paintings.
The 1956-57 oil "Ode to Thelonious" (as in jazz pianist and composer
Thelonious Monk) applies Cubist structure to nothing but vaporous,
colored space. Shifting, angular patches of blue and green shot through
with bursts of violet and darting red-orange lines open deep vistas --
then suddenly close them down, snapping attention back to the painted
surface. Unlike the earlier "Jazz Players," this poetic visual song
is fully non-figurative.
Between making these two paintings Altoon fell under the spell of
Willem de Kooning, titan of the New York School. The older artist's
stature was exploding at precisely the moment the Angeleno was living
in New York. De Kooning also dropped the figure for pure abstraction
not long before Altoon painted his "Ode."
It's also tempting to tie Altoon's interest to De Kooning's own
passionate admiration for the work of another troubled young Armenian
American painter -- De Kooning's friend Arshile Gorky, who committed
suicide in 1948 at 44.
Altoon's large "Mother and Child" (1954), painted with great
technical finesse, is a marvelous dance between color and line. A
neo-Cubist abstraction, it is aptly likened in the show's catalog to
De Kooning's celebrated paintings of women from the late 1940s and
early 1950s. Yet it contains none of the New York painter's fierce
and violent aggression.
Instead, Altoon's monumental woman, seated with a child in her lap,
is a virtual Madonna enthroned. Executed in a lively if serene palette
of warm browns and pale, cool greens, the painting is closer in tone
and subject to Gorky's heartfelt figurative paintings of "The Artist
and His Mother." (Those were seen in the great 2010 Gorky retrospective
at the Museum of Contemporary Art.) Conflicting childhood memories of
security and anxiety within a context of feminine nurturing loom large.
Several years on, as Altoon matured into his mid-30s, those impulses
would be caressed in lyrical -- and inescapably erotic -- reveries.
The canvas becomes a field for the colorful interplay of suggestive,
fragmentary signs for buttocks, breasts, phalluses, vulvas, limbs
and visceral, sentient animals. Lush, sometimes messy shapes, brush
strokes, splatters and forms evoke a feral sexuality engaged in a
struggle with cultivation and, often, whimsy.
Lush, sometimes messy shapes, brush strokes, splatters and forms
evoke a feral sexuality engaged in a struggle with cultivation and,
often, whimsy.-
The tussle is most explicit in his ink drawings, with their thin,
quivering, agitated lines often describing body parts and frank
sexual activity. The precedent of Picasso's eroticism is evident,
especially in an untitled 1959 graphite and ink-wash drawing of a
shadowy feminine figure serenaded by a flute-playing satyr or Minotaur.
Sex is also an obvious tool of mass-media commercial art, flooding
late-20th century America, with which Altoon was well-versed. Several
satirical works play with advertising motifs.
One shows a dapper young couple in a White Owl cigar ad: He smokes,
she pouts. Rather than focus on a close-up as a conventional ad would,
Altoon pulls back (like a reverse camera-zoom) to show the fashionable
pair full-length: Both are stark naked below the waist. The cigar
scene turns into an ad for post-coital relaxation.
The '60s sexual revolution was propelled by many things, including
a postwar generational shift, scientific developments like the birth
control pill, a growing and newly prosperous middle class and other
deep transformations in American society. As it unfolded, artists in
Altoon's orbit -- Kenneth Price, Judy Gerowitz (later Chicago), Craig
Kauffman and more -- moved sexuality to the forefront of their imagery,
often in abstract forms. (A 1964 group exhibition at Ferus Gallery,
where Altoon also showed, was notoriously titled "The Studs.") Few
addressed the experience in as riveting, seductive and playfully
generous a manner as Altoon.
One interesting feature of the LACMA show is the invitation offered
to five artists to contribute short essays to the catalog. They make
for interesting reading.
None is more incisive than Monica Majoli, who writes on "the
omnipotence of flesh" in both human experience and Altoon's work.
"Promiscuous abstraction" is the phrase she uses to describe his art
in the 1960s, and it is hard to think of a better one.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-knight-altoon-review-20140611-column.html#page=1
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Los Angeles Times
June 11 2014
Christopher Knight
or a brief, shining moment in the 1960s, John Altoon was the great
American painter of the great American sexual revolution.
Voluptuous color and luxurious interpenetrations of sensuous forms
conspired to make messy, elegant, often witty abstract pictures. Their
hedonistic punch is a delicious indulgence.
Altoon's sudden death in 1969 from a heart attack at the age of 43
cut short a promising career. Where he would have gone is of course
impossible to know, but many of his best paintings, made over the
previous seven years, landed in museum collections up and down
California. Today they look as fresh and fine as any from the period.
Many are included among the 18 works on canvas and 50 on paper or
cardboard assembled by curator Carol S. Eliel for the much-anticipated
survey newly opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A prolific
draftsman, Altoon destroyed a considerable number of his paintings,
so the show is a concise overview.
Altoon's interest in the cool, seductive rhythms of West Coast jazz
informed his work.-
Altoon was born in Los Angeles in 1925 of Armenian-immigrant parents
(the family name was Altoonian). Thanks to military service during
World War II and the subsequent GI Bill, he studied commercial
illustration and painting at three area art schools -- Otis, Art Center
and Chouinard. At 26 he moved to New York City and, three years later,
to Europe.
Suffering a psychological breakdown abroad -- Altoon is believed to
have wrestled with schizophrenia or manic depression, which landed
him in the hospital several times -- he returned permanently to Los
Angeles in 1956. Twice married (his first, to Fay Spain, an actress
who mostly worked in television, ended in divorce in 1962), he made
his living teaching and doing commercial work.
The LACMA show opens with a certainly skillful if uninspired painting
of a pair of jazz saxophonists made around 1950. The figures are
rendered in a self-consciously arty style -- call it "mass-market
modern" -- that is a kind of Cubist faceting squashed flat.
Like artists as diverse as David Park in the Bay Area and Wallace
Berman and William Claxton in L.A., however, Altoon's interest in
the cool, seductive rhythms of West Coast jazz informed his work. He
designed album covers for Pacific Jazz Records and other companies,
but the music's reliance on sensual improvisation is what infiltrated
his paintings.
The 1956-57 oil "Ode to Thelonious" (as in jazz pianist and composer
Thelonious Monk) applies Cubist structure to nothing but vaporous,
colored space. Shifting, angular patches of blue and green shot through
with bursts of violet and darting red-orange lines open deep vistas --
then suddenly close them down, snapping attention back to the painted
surface. Unlike the earlier "Jazz Players," this poetic visual song
is fully non-figurative.
Between making these two paintings Altoon fell under the spell of
Willem de Kooning, titan of the New York School. The older artist's
stature was exploding at precisely the moment the Angeleno was living
in New York. De Kooning also dropped the figure for pure abstraction
not long before Altoon painted his "Ode."
It's also tempting to tie Altoon's interest to De Kooning's own
passionate admiration for the work of another troubled young Armenian
American painter -- De Kooning's friend Arshile Gorky, who committed
suicide in 1948 at 44.
Altoon's large "Mother and Child" (1954), painted with great
technical finesse, is a marvelous dance between color and line. A
neo-Cubist abstraction, it is aptly likened in the show's catalog to
De Kooning's celebrated paintings of women from the late 1940s and
early 1950s. Yet it contains none of the New York painter's fierce
and violent aggression.
Instead, Altoon's monumental woman, seated with a child in her lap,
is a virtual Madonna enthroned. Executed in a lively if serene palette
of warm browns and pale, cool greens, the painting is closer in tone
and subject to Gorky's heartfelt figurative paintings of "The Artist
and His Mother." (Those were seen in the great 2010 Gorky retrospective
at the Museum of Contemporary Art.) Conflicting childhood memories of
security and anxiety within a context of feminine nurturing loom large.
Several years on, as Altoon matured into his mid-30s, those impulses
would be caressed in lyrical -- and inescapably erotic -- reveries.
The canvas becomes a field for the colorful interplay of suggestive,
fragmentary signs for buttocks, breasts, phalluses, vulvas, limbs
and visceral, sentient animals. Lush, sometimes messy shapes, brush
strokes, splatters and forms evoke a feral sexuality engaged in a
struggle with cultivation and, often, whimsy.
Lush, sometimes messy shapes, brush strokes, splatters and forms
evoke a feral sexuality engaged in a struggle with cultivation and,
often, whimsy.-
The tussle is most explicit in his ink drawings, with their thin,
quivering, agitated lines often describing body parts and frank
sexual activity. The precedent of Picasso's eroticism is evident,
especially in an untitled 1959 graphite and ink-wash drawing of a
shadowy feminine figure serenaded by a flute-playing satyr or Minotaur.
Sex is also an obvious tool of mass-media commercial art, flooding
late-20th century America, with which Altoon was well-versed. Several
satirical works play with advertising motifs.
One shows a dapper young couple in a White Owl cigar ad: He smokes,
she pouts. Rather than focus on a close-up as a conventional ad would,
Altoon pulls back (like a reverse camera-zoom) to show the fashionable
pair full-length: Both are stark naked below the waist. The cigar
scene turns into an ad for post-coital relaxation.
The '60s sexual revolution was propelled by many things, including
a postwar generational shift, scientific developments like the birth
control pill, a growing and newly prosperous middle class and other
deep transformations in American society. As it unfolded, artists in
Altoon's orbit -- Kenneth Price, Judy Gerowitz (later Chicago), Craig
Kauffman and more -- moved sexuality to the forefront of their imagery,
often in abstract forms. (A 1964 group exhibition at Ferus Gallery,
where Altoon also showed, was notoriously titled "The Studs.") Few
addressed the experience in as riveting, seductive and playfully
generous a manner as Altoon.
One interesting feature of the LACMA show is the invitation offered
to five artists to contribute short essays to the catalog. They make
for interesting reading.
None is more incisive than Monica Majoli, who writes on "the
omnipotence of flesh" in both human experience and Altoon's work.
"Promiscuous abstraction" is the phrase she uses to describe his art
in the 1960s, and it is hard to think of a better one.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-knight-altoon-review-20140611-column.html#page=1
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress