James Bishop In Remembrance (1927-2021)

Conversation with a Friend (in lieu of an obituary for James Bishop). February 2021.

I had expected to respond to you sooner. Then a few days passed. Jim’s death, with advanced age, is hardly a surprise. Nevertheless, his loss has somehow thrown me into slow motion, like a car skidding out of control at speed. I seem to be functioning as usual and then I realize that the day has gone by and I have been more or less lost in my memories of Jim, of the considerable time I spent with him (seems now considerable in retrospect, which it was), of visits to his house and of his paintings that have meant so much to me.

But also you asked how I had been keeping and that is always a daunting question. I could respond, fine. I could also respond, not very well. It is the ache of consciousness, this curse of Socrates, which never relents. The soul of modern man is certainly sick, perhaps terminally, it has perhaps already expired, and yet modern man is still being born into a new subjectivity. This was Baudelaire’s and Flaubert’s lament and it was also Jim’s. Two hundred years of effort to bring forth a modern subject! All the great creative minds have been engaged in this endeavor, I would say. In response, and out of fear, fecklessness and inertia, and because normativity does not know what else to do and, above all, because the utilitarian cannot conceive of anything else than to seek consolation in misery, the enormous dead weight of humanity’s social identity has pushed back against them. Just think of Géricault (not Delacroix), Courbet, Manet and Cézanne (with their friend Baudelaire), standing shoulder to shoulder in opposition to the positivist values of the nineteenth century! You have the first section of my book The Modern Aesthetic, right there!

I have been replaying Carter Ratcliff’s walk-through at Zwirner. It’s a remarkable and precious testimony to Jim and his painting. We owe Carter a debt of gratitude. The wall color, indeed! Bob Morris was once scoping me out with the idea of doing an exhibition in my gallery. He came to visit the space and looked aghast at its off-white (raw umber) walls. He said he would have to reconvert me to the virtue of pure whiteness. Needless to say, we did not get any further in the exchange. Carter mentions Melville’s notion of the ‘isolato’: Jim was after all a Protestant in the courts of Florence, Bergamo and Venice. Jim identified above all with the psychological component in Lotto. Carter continues to speak of the impurity of color, the complexity and ambiguity of art and its engagement in life. He identifies the issue of scale as different from size, as Newman had already understood. We are really talking about a modern metaphysic, of a Nietzschean order, or again of the birth of a modern aesthetic, as I have attempted to outline it in my recent writings, that contemporary art has employed itself to deny.

I have said that if one wants to understand Jim’s paintings, just look out of any window onto the world outside. What will you see? If you are familiar with Jim’s paintings, you will see meaning in the world. It was a great privilege to visit Jim’s house in Blévy and to look out of the windows of the small painting room with his art library, and then the larger salon beyond, on the second floor of the house. Those are the same windows from which Jim looked out across at the house opposite, with the profile of the church entrance on the periphery of the mind’s eye, in cold and damp winter weather, very much like these last few days that we have been living here in New York, in the season of Jim’s death. I attach such a souvenir of Blévy below. When you see such a painting on paper, you are there with him. You see the world as he saw it.

When Carter speaks of the architectural structures (John Ashbery described them as half architecture, half air), which could be windows, in his paintings, he did not mention one other important element. Yes, Jim spoke of these bars as introducing complexity, but there was also the element of excess that he embraces. This evokes the philosophy of Georges Bataille, with which Jim was quite conversant, but would never mention in connection with his painting.

Let’s think about Jim’s paintings. They were painted on stretched canvas which had been given a white primer. Jim’s medium was oil paint, thinned with turpentine. The canvas, mounted on stretcher, lay horizontally on the floor. Jim applied the paint with a brush. He declared to me, with some exasperation, that he had to get the paint onto the canvas somehow and he did not want to just throw it on! I was always amused by Jim’s suspicion about anyone making a claim for a connection to Pollock! (What did Jim think of Pollock? I asked him. He stated that you could never discount him. Given this equivocal response, I asked the simple question: why not? After a few moments of silence, came the reply: “Because he is too important!”) The canvas, sealed with primer, presented a non-porous surface and the very liquid oil of his medium presented a highly volatile and unpredictable situation once applied, which is to say that it would move quickly and in a manner extremely hard to contain once on the canvas.

Jim no doubt used his brush to spread the paint, but he also tilted his canvas from different sides as it lay horizontally on the floor, in order to get the paint to spread and to influence its flow in one direction or another. To do this, Jim needed to be on all sides of his canvas. Jim spoke to me ruefully of slipping on patches of wet paint on the floor and of tripping up as he maneuvered, perhaps awkwardly, from one side of the canvas to the other, pitting himself against this flow of paint. He also spoke of things going wrong and the need to abandon and discard canvases. This liquid flow of paint would then have to be staunched with sponges or paper towels In order to build up his structures. This introduced the effect of an excessive energy surging across the surface of the canvas and then being opposed by a structure seeking to confine its flow. I always saw a connection here to what Robert Smithson called boundaries in art, stating that genuine art had boundaries and that phony art claimed to dispense with them, and adding that the problem for the artist is that the boundaries keep shifting! I never dared to make this connection with Jim! Who knows what he would have said, if I had!

The structures in his paintings were not drawn, of course. Or were they (they might have been measured and marked out)? This question would also have been greeted by a dismissive response from Jim, if it had been asked. I don’t think I ever did? Or I might have and he did then say something to the effect of how would one lay out the composition without some guiding measurements? Right, of course, I would have mumbled, if I had got myself into that predicament. I don’t remember. He built the image with his medium, consisting of oil paint diluted with turpentine. The paint accumulated a double layer as one area abutted another, thus creating the divisions of the structure. In this manner, Jim created the most beautiful lines in his paintings, that were not the product of his hand.

Jim spoke of applying the paint to the canvas with a brush. Yet by tilting the canvas, the trace of the hand tended to effacement in the liquid paint medium. Presence and absence were introduced. I persist in seeing here a link to Pollock’s painting that Jim was always at pains to deny. And then, yes, as Carter says in his walk-through of the Zwirner exhibit, he lost interest in the large paintings and wanted to work from the wrist on paper of small format. I entirely agree with Carter that Jim maintained the scale (human) of the larger paintings in these small paintings on paper. The broader issue was that he had found a certain experience in the canvases and now wanted to refine it with the greater control of working on paper. One might add that he also wanted to react perversely against the contemporary tendency towards the spectacular in contemporary art, by painting apparently modest images that the uninitiated eye would overlook. There is always the issue of being dared to overlook what Jim is about in his paintings, and thus miss the whole point! Too bad for you, then!

I have said it somewhere else, I think, but I will say it here because I think it is important: Bishop seems to me to be the only painter in the second half of the twentieth century to have understood that the great achievement of Cézanne was to have discovered how oil paint can convey depth through color. Bonnard is the link. This understanding of how color resonates with a truth about human life, provides the true break with renaissance perspective in modern painting, opening up a rich and original modern subject and casting, in passing, a dismissive judgement on the modernist notion of flatness! Greenberg has no recorded response to Bishop. I never mentioned his name in our exchange. I think, in retrospect, the reason is fairly clear. Bishop, coming along in the late 1950’s, was devoted to the great tradition of modern art that he had inherited from the previous century and a half of achievement. Greenberg had bought into the notion of a national American school of art which would seek to monopolize the rewards of economic dominance in the post-war period. Jim had no regard for this point of view.

I was very struck that in his Zwirner walk-through, Carter would bring up Melville, by association, in mentioning the notion of the ‘isolato’. I have long thought that it is not at all far-fetched to associate the name of Melville with Bishop. This goes to the whole issue of modern identity, as I conceive it, which is to say, taking it in a larger time-frame, to extend back to the advent of what we can call ‘the reform’ in the late fifteenth century. What do I mean by that? Well, the medieval mind conceived of twin independent spheres, the secular and the sacred, or religious. To escape the tyranny of temporal power, the aesthetic and intellectual conscience had the alternative sphere of church law in which to move. The, perhaps unintended by Luther, consequence of reformation was to shatter that duality and to place the aesthetic firmly in the power of social utility. From this emerges one dimensional calvinist theocracy, leading directly to modern totalitarianism. It also ushers in the American notion of art as entertainment.

This is the background for the ‘isolato’ of Melville’s imprimatur. It is also the background of the modern aesthetic, as I conceive it, and the powerful rejection of positivism and utilitarianism that we find among the great modern writers and painters, across the last two centuries. It is also this dissidence that our contemporary art world aims to ‘isolate’ by subjecting art to the terms of commerce and a social agenda. None of this is happenstance. Jim understood all of it, both intuitively and intellectually. In this matter of aesthetic destiny, I have come to think of Nietzsche, not by coincidence the son and grand-son of Lutheran pastors, as the key philosophical protagonist. To see further what I mean in relationship to Jim and to better understand the unique contribution that his painting makes in these contemporary circumstances, I would refer the reader to On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense of 1873, which follows on from The Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche breaks definitively with Socrates. If one reads this text, one has in hand exactly Jim’s aesthetic and intellectual outlook. Of course, he would never have admitted that! It goes without saying!

Jim, of course, was a classic product of Anglo-Americano culture. I always derived immense pleasure, tinged with amusement, not to mention, of course, instruction, from his company. He was, shall we say, one of the family!

Salutations,

Paul

February 2021