Gene Davis Painted Over at U of a Museum of Art

When did you bring together the Jefferson Place Gallery in Washington?

ALICE DENNY SAW MY WORK in Corcoran area shows or in a local group show. She may have seen my one-man show at Catholic University in 1953. I also had a bear witness at the Franz Bader Gallery in 1956, then I wasn't totally unknown. The Jefferson Identify was a co-op gallery founded jointly by Alice Denny and a young wealthy collector effectually town whose name escapes me. It was made upward more often than not of the American Academy group who were oriented toward de Kooning and the figure. They included Robert Gates, Joe Summerford, Helene McKenzie Herzbrun and Bob Calfee.

Alice came around to expect at my work, liked it and said she was going to propose me for membership in the gallery. It seems that you had to have the votes of three of the member artists in society to be accepted. To make a long story short, I didn't go enough votes to get into the gallery. Alice had to exert considerable pressure to become me in, which she did, and I had a bear witness there in '59.

What did you bear witness?

At that time I had washed quite a number of stripe paintings without really recognizing their importance or their significance. Like many other artists at that indicate, a lot of us in Washington were trying to find our style out of Abstract Expressionism. I was experimenting with different things at the fourth dimension, but the bear witness was mainly action paintings. I had other work I kept in my closet you might say until a immature collector by the proper noun of Mark Moyens dropped into my studio i day. He looked at the Abstract Expressionist work, yawned a bit, and looked over in the corner and said, "Who did that?" It was a stripe painting. I said, "I did," and he got and then enthusiastic it sent me off on a piffling excursion of painting stripe paintings. His was the first existent enthusiasm I had experienced for my stripe paintings.

What led y'all to pigment stripes?

I had ever admired Barnett Newman's work. I saw his first evidence at the Parsons Gallery in New York in 1951. It impressed me very much. Throughout the mid-fifties—a menstruation dominated mostly past de Kooning—I idea near Newman, even though I was still going to schoolhouse nether de Kooning, in contrast to the other Washington painters who went to school with Frankenthaler and Pollock. All through the de Kooningesque period of painterly paintings I was slashing away, but stripes found their way into a number of works. I don't know why. I only had a sort of vagrant idea of dropping a stripe down. I have one of these Abstract Expressionist stripe paintings down at the Corcoran Gallery now. Of course Newman must have been in the back of my mind. In fact in the fifties I thought and then much of Newman, I tried to buy a Newman painting. I wrote to him, telling him how moved I was by his piece of work and asking if he would sell me a painting. He wrote dorsum saying how touched he was because he wasn't getting whatever recognition and was not beingness critically well received. He said, "This is what makes it all worthwhile. I'll look around and see if I can notice a painting for you." It just fizzled out and I didn't hear from him once more; he probably forgot about information technology.

My admiration for Newman during a period of predominantly biomorphic painterly work led me to stripes. Oft one looks to the almost diametrically opposed ideas as a way out. Information technology was heresy in 1958 to practice a stripe. I like the fact that it was an outrageous idea to practise stripes. Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg were also very much in the air then. They seemed to point a way out of de Kooning and Pollock in that, for the first time, they were emphasizing literature; that is, they were unabashedly embracing subject matter. I must confess that the idea of trite bailiwick affair appealed to me. It was a sort of corollary motivation in painting stripes. I idea maybe stripes would exist my way of getting to trite subject matter because stripes are in dresses, they're in wallpaper, they're in decorative fine art. They are trite in the aforementioned style that the American flag and Campbell'south soup cans and comic strips are trite. So I was a little influenced by the precursors of Popular fine art.

How did you know their work?

Through the magazines. Every bit a thing of fact, I remember being extremely impressed with an Art News cover in 1958 of Johns'southward target. I still accept it upstairs. Y'all know, when y'all've been used to looking at Milton Resnick and de Kooning and Philip Guston, and you choice upwardly a magazine and suddenly at that place is a totally symmetrical cliché on the comprehend and it's presented equally fine art—it's a bombshell. Then I figured what the hell, I'll do some stripes. If he tin can do that, I can do stripes. So my stripes were not motivated exclusively by formalistic considerations.

What do y'all recollect is the difference betwixt, say, stripes in painting, and stripes in wallpaper design—what is the cutoff point betwixt painting and applied fine art?

The only requirement I make of art, and this may sound a little simplistic, is that it look expert and continue looking good with the passage of time, whether information technology's wallpaper or whatever. Maybe wallpaper can exist fine art, besides, if it continues to await good. That's quite a demand actually, that something continue to look good forever.

Practise you recollect it might have something to exercise with spatial qualities?

What my stripes have become now are quite unlike from what they started out every bit. I didn't actually understand what I was nigh at first. I think peradventure the best painters don't know what they're doing in the get-go. The painter who can tell y'all exactly what he's doing isn't doing much. At beginning I didn't take the foggiest notion of what I was doing. It simply seemed similar maybe a good thought. Pure whim motivated it. I think that's a pretty proficient motivation anyway, to do something but for the sheer hell of information technology. Later on I began to realize there was something behind my decision. You meet, I'thousand a frustrated musician. I studied music all through my teens. Simply I have a tin ear, and I wasn't really very good. Painting stripes with musical intervals may be a kind of unconscious bounty for the fact that I never made it as a musician. I don't ready out to practise musical paintings—that's corny. The fact remains, however, that music is an art of interval and my work is an art of interval.

I have always been an interval artist. Even now in the new black and white paintings I'm working on, I am interested in spatial interval. Before it was color interval.

What's the maximum number of colors y'all've used?

I oasis't counted them downwardly to the concluding color, but I did a committee for Nelson Rockefeller for the S Mall projection thing in New York which is 60 feet long. It has 750 stripes in information technology and I think threescore colors. Nevertheless it does not meet as being all that decorated. The stripes, hopefully, are in the right place.

Practise y'all exercise sketches earlier the paintings or do you just kind of place the colors?

I haven't any idea of where any painting is going when I start out. If I did I'one thousand afraid it would cramp my manner. I'm the well-nigh intuitive of painters. This sounds a little flake flip and I don't intend it to be, but I often will use the colour I have the well-nigh of at the moment and trust to my instincts to leave of trouble. Just whatever I happen to have around is put on because I take to bounce off of things, I have to get something started. Information technology'due south sort of like a jazz musician. He'll use an erstwhile standard tune to bounciness off of. I've got to become some red or some green upwards in that location on the sail to have something to chronicle to and then I start off and I pigment my way out of the painting. The painting takes over after a while, and I become along for the ride. It shows me where to go and I'm not always the master of where the painting ultimately winds up. In that sense I'm a very romantic painter.

One of the things I am interested in about the early paintings is that when you start centering the image, you have a big field of raw canvass and a small centered foursquare of stripes. How and why did that come about?

I recall that's kind of a left-handed salute to Albers. Given the stripe equally an increase of infinite division, you are apt to come with a million different variations on it. You say O.K. I'm not going to practise the nude, I'yard not going to practise stars, I'thou going to do the stripe, that's my subject matter. Let's say you take three painters who are using stripes; it'south not too surprising that some of them might come up up with a number of pictorial solutions to the stripe that are related. A centered square only happened to exist one variation that i could practice with the stripe. Centering them and relating them this fashion or running them all the way down from the center are two obvious formats. I think critics who similar to describe comparisons betwixt 1 artist and another assume that then and so got this idea from so and so. I think that'southward a little too easy. I think certain things are in the air and a number of people may get involved with similar bug.

I certainly see that one could, if one wanted, draw comparisons betwixt my centered image idea and all those Noland targets, for example. The fact remains that this was a coincidence. I tin can't evidence that to your satisfaction but I don't call back that it makes any difference. There is a relationship obviously between those works and Tom Downing's grid paintings too.

There's that curious 1958 painting with the Snoopy drawing, where the motif is symmetrically centered. Information technology kind of prefigures what happens in later stripe painting. I suppose information technology is inevitable that somebody is going to find such a solution. At that place are besides your paintings of 1952–54 in which in that location'due south an empty heart. And there are the paintings of an open oblong or square in the center. Where did these formats develop from? What were you lot thinking about at that point?

It's hard to pinpoint it, but—this sounds kind of pretentious—1 of the guiding lights of my endeavor in art has always been that one should try to practise the outrageous matter, the affair which is seemingly ridiculous considering I call up that's generally where it happens, in the area of the seemingly ridiculous. In 1952 the idea of ignoring Cubist composition and plopping something on dead heart in the middle of a sail seemed similar a sufficiently absurd idea to me. I actually feel that although they are not really closely related to Newman, he may have served as a model.

Did you ever see those early on Newmans? The Death of Euclid, for instance?

Only in reproduction. Whether I saw them then or not is quite another thing. I don't think they received that wide a circulation in the early '50s, but I saw them later. Just you know Newman serves equally a kind of example of how far you tin can get and get away with it.

Your 1954 painting with the big blueish square in the center, is that related to Kline'southward rectangles?

Aye, it is a kind of homage to Kline. I did three others like it, each in a unlike color, but on a sheet viii past 10 anxiety—one was an enormous ruby square—kind of similar a kick in the stomach—powerful. These paintings are of form essentially Abstract Expressionist although they are concerned with construction. I must confess also that one guy who turned me on for a brief time when I saw his work at Kootz was Dubuffet. You may exist able to run into some distant relationship between my early paintings and Dubuffet.

Yes, they have the continuous surface of a Dubuffet and depend on impastoed texture to maintain it and to avoid conventional effigy-basis relationships. It'southward odd that Dubuffet should have interested a painter in Washington in the '50s. Tell me more about what it was like in the fifties in Washington.

None of us actually took ourselves all that seriously. Artistic activity sort of gravitated around the almanac Corcoran expanse show. I'll show you some catalogs; nosotros were all in those shows. It was the but place a local artist could go any exposure. I think each year that it was the exciting event for an artist. If y'all got in the area show, it was important. And of course there was the Washington Workshop of the Arts, an important oasis, equally well as the Phillips Gallery.

What was the Workshop?

The Washington Workshop was a school run by Ida and Leon Berkowitz where quite a number of people, including Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, taught. I never taught or studied there, but I used to go up occasionally and hang around. It was a place you lot could become and bullshit with the other artists. There'south never actually been a identify like the Cedar Bar or Max'due south in Washington. We don't have that sort of thing. For the about role, there's never actually been an art community here. If there's a closeness, it'southward because everybody's isolated.

Do yous call back that isolation had any effect, either positive or negative? Washington work looks very original; peradventure the isolation has something to practice with that.

I recall that'south truthful. I recollect Clem Greenberg always held equally his ain opinion that information technology was valuable to live in Washington considering yous were free of any political entanglements, and you weren't subject to any force per unit area to arrange.

Back in those days, information technology would have been the most grandiose thing for me ever to think I could make it in New York. It was enough to go far a Corcoran area show.

How did the fact that your piece of work was unlike from what you were seeing in New York affect you?

I think it'southward sort of like handwriting. After a while you settle into a style that's comfy to y'all, and you don't have as much control over that every bit you think. At that place's an awful lot to the precept that success in art, similar anything else, is a matter of standing on the right corner at the correct time. I think geography is destiny in art, and the fact that we all lived in Washington can't be discounted as a role of what nosotros did.

Can you tell me something about the artists you lot knew in Washington and the nature of their relationships?

I first met Ken Noland at, I think, the Institute of Contemporary Art run by Robert Richman, around 1950, I believe. Robin Bond, an English friend of Ken'due south who was didactics at American University introduced us. I met Morris Louis at the Washington Workshop for the Arts in 1953, I think. I tin can call back Leon Berkowitz introducing me to him. He was standing up on a ladder painting the ceiling of Ida's role. He reached downwardly, shook hands with me, and that was the last time I saw him for well-nigh 5 years. He was rather a recluse and he didn't mingle too much. I recollect I saw him only three times in my life despite the fact that nosotros were Washingtonians and he was in the art world. I saw Ken more oftentimes. He was more than gregarious. I always liked Ken; from the early on days when I knew him he was essentially an outgoing, helpful kind of guy. Nosotros both exhibited at the Dupont Theater Gallery in 1952; afterward he saw my testify (I exhibited drawings), he called me upwardly to ask me if I wanted to prove at Catholic Academy where he was didactics.

I remember the fourth dimension that Harry Jackson (he now does cowboy fine art) and Ken and I met at the Phillips Gallery in front of, believe it or not, The Luncheon of the Boating Party past Renoir. Harry Jackson had just come back from Espana where he was absolutely destroyed by Velasquez. He was gear up to give upwardly. He was a pretty good action painter effectually the fifties, only he took this trip to Europe and information technology destroyed him. He came back, renounced it all, and began trying to do information technology like the Old Masters. Jackson had a series of slides of Velasquez with which he was trying to bowl Ken and me over. The one thing that stands out near that trivial meeting was Ken looking at The Luncheon of the Boating Party and calling information technology a crock of shit except for the niggling teacup on the table, which he said was moderately well painted.

Did you and Noland take anything in common?

I think 1 of the obvious things we had in common was an early worship of Paul Klee. Klee was my first honey when I began to paint and Ken was as well influenced past Klee. I think this may have had something to do with the fact that the Phillips Gallery always had a Paul Klee room. Nosotros were also interested in the paintings of August Vincent Tack because they were and then plainly un-French. Generally the Phillips Collection is French in its tone—nosotros always used to say Mr. Phillips likes nut-brown paintings. Simply Mr. Phillips' personal sense of taste, which was and then French, also led him to buy many paintings with an emphasis on colour. He has Delacroix, he has a number of Monticellis and Impressionist paintings.

Do you lot experience the Impressionist paintings to be seen at the Phillips Gallery influenced Washington artists?

Yes, I'm certain they did. Of course you tin can't underestimate the influence of Pollock, which involved overall-ness and breaking down the surface into little pieces. Linear all-overness, it'due south true, merely another version of that could exist breaking it downward into petty daubs or dots. But, as you say, all-overness is related to Impressionism. I retrieve that the Phillips Collection played a crucial part in the accent on colour in Washington. I tin't bear witness it, but it seems a likely judge.

Yous spoke of the absence of any kind of geometric painting, such as Mondrian, in Washington, and of how this kind of painting did non interest Phillips, and of how this may take affected the direction of Washington painting.

That's very true. One had to go to the Philadelphia Museum to see this side of art, the Mondrians, Maleviches, Van Doesburgs, all the people who offered an culling to Impressionism. For a long time I idea that the only real arroyo to art was painterliness and chromatic color.

You spoke about the importance of August Vincent Tack. What exactly did you mean?

He was not very important to me; only he was probably more of import to Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland because it's a logical step from Pollock and Frankenthaler to Tack. I didn't come up out of that sensibility at all. Equally a affair of fact, I was non really a great admirer of Frankenthaler'due south until afterwards when her qualities began to become more apparent.

What was Louis painting in Washington in the fifties?

Louis was doing some very turgid, dingy, tardily Cubist type works in 1952. But after a trip to New York, he came back and immediately began to paint enormous mural-size unsized canvases that he would show here and there in Washington.

How did they bear upon you?

To me it was well-nigh as if he were doing something unlike from what the balance of the states were doing. All the rest of u.s.a. were playing baseball, and he was playing football game. It was that foreign.

Did it inspire you in any way?

No.

Technically though, weren't you painting on raw sail in 1958?

Aye. As a thing of fact, my introduction to unsized canvas was influenced past Louis and Noland. But of course they got it from Frankenthaler, so this sort of falls into the "so what" class.

Did you lot talk to other Washington painters?

It's a unique surround here. I don't actually mix very much and nearly of the other artists, the well-known ones, don't particularly either. At present in the interests of historical accuracy one ought to say that Tom Downing and Howard Mehring shared a studio for a time. They were partners in a gallery they opened in the late fifties on P Street called the Origo Gallery, which showed a lot of pretty expert artists. That's where I first saw Mehring's piece of work. He and Tom were both one-time students of Noland's at Catholic Academy.

Information technology seems very evident what happened after 1958 now, simply that flow of '57–58 in Washington is really not very clear. And I don't think there's any clarity to be discovered. If you're looking for a pattern or something that has clarity, I recollect you're looking in vain because it doesn't exist. It'south not cracking. At that place were a lot of things that happened that don't seem to make too much sense. Information technology'due south interesting that I am linked with the Washington Colour School despite the fact that I arrived at that betoken through a route basically alien to everything the others were doing here.

But there are things that link the work done in Washington. I was surprised at how coherent that testify at the Corcoran looked with the Melzac Collection of Louis, Noland, Mehring and Downing and Reed along with your before works in the separate exhibition. Undoubtedly, Washington had a school of painting. There are many similarities, non just the stain technique, just the button toward structuring color afterwards the early all-over period. You said, yet, that in the late fifties everyone was showing different types of work, casting around for a style.

That'southward true. And of course, then was I. Nosotros all were. I recollect that Howard Mehring's evidence at the Origo Gallery had nigh five different styles of painting. And Noland was experiment-ing with many types of work. He did some not bad large poured paintings. His 1958 show at the Jefferson Place Gallery, for instance, was all poured paint—merely big daubs, rivulets of paint poured across the sail. Then, early in 1959, he had a life-size expressionistic male nude in the window of the Jefferson Identify. You look back at it, it's kind of surprising. This takes nothing away from Noland, because he was rooting around looking for something. None of the states knew quite where to get. I recollect it's a myth to perpetuate or to accelerate the theory that there is a clear-cut begetter-son relationship in this business. Let's but say we all had accessible to us the aforementioned sources and nosotros all drew certain conclusions. Anyone who thinks that in that location is this historically neat division—Noland and Louis, then the second generation, Davis, Downing, and Mehring (and now a third generation!), is kidding himself.

Do you experience Clement Greenberg had any influence on the so-called Washington Schoolhouse?

Oh, undeniably. I'yard perhaps overstating it, and being a bit overdramatic, only we knew that he was a kingmaker; nosotros knew that he had immense ability, as evidenced by his piece in Art International in 1960 almost Noland and Louis. The effect it had was very impressive.

Was it demoralizing or impressive?

Possibly a fiddling of both, I don't know. But this was the first time any such thing ever happened in Washington. Nobody had e'er written upwards a local artist in a national art magazine. That fabricated a tremendous impression on us. And who did it? Clement Greenberg. I didn't know him, at the time, just he was a presence that we were all aware of. Later, of grade, he put all v of us—Downing, Mehring, myself and of course Noland and Louis in his post-painterly brainchild bear witness. To that extent at least he was an influence.

Generally, how would yous describe what happened in Washington in the late fifties? How, for case, would yous account for Louis'southward action paintings, of which at that place is one of the few remaining examples (a 1956 untitled brainchild) in the Melzac Drove?

The thought of action painting was very difficult to resist, and Noland and Louis found it very hard to resist besides. In the light of all that action painting, that ability stuff, that strong-arm stuff, poured veils of tentative color may have seemed to Morris Louis not enough and maybe he, not feeling all that sure of himself, decided, well possibly I'm wrong, maybe these guys are right and perchance I ought to sling pigment a little bit. I recall he slung paint for a few years and and so decided to reject all of this and go back and option upwards on the veil paintings. At that point it seemed to make more sense. By 1958 everybody was slinging paint; information technology was a cliche we were all struggling to get beyond.

—Barbara Rose