Radical Simplicity

its a gift to be simple , its a gift to be free

I guess i have to introduce this piece. These are artists i consider outside the usual traditions of the twentieth century and who think radically about the spirit or make comment on the Mystery . I think there is a shadowed tradition of somberness and severity that is missed when people make the modernist cannon . Some of these people are in the cannon but i think they are all iconoclasts.

Cezanne

In the last years of his life he retreated to the south of france. He gave up his naked woman and sensuous fruit. He painted for close to 20 years endless ( okay maybe 100) variations of Mont Sainte-Victoire .
It is what he saw from his cell like room . These seemed to move from explicit realism to radical cubism. The still lives with pairs fucked up perspective enough to leave clues. But the later landscapes seemed so broken, they still challenge . It is not the erotomania inherent in Picassos minators or Warhols almost autistic playing with icons. It is a slow and ardours progression towards a illogical conclusion.

Malevich

Malevich once replaced an ikon found above the doorframe of Russian Schools with a black square. Later propaganda claimed this was an atheist move. It wasn't. Malevich was a spirtulast who believed that spirit could have no form . His early work , his single squares of non colour indicated a belief in rejecting image. Furthering the revolution, similar to early Christians and Muslims. He mellowed out as the October Revolt solidified. His work just after the Revolution was almost crowded and extravagantly coloured but with the same geometric rigidness. It is a disappointment near his death he reverted to fairly banal genre painting . The iconoclast lost .

Mondrian

Mondrian started painting trees and flowers. Lovely and delicate and almost as light as the snow ; they betray and almost best his japanese icons. He worked as well on trees and a pier and ocean series. All of these he would later reject them as inward or indulgent . His mature work involved the three primary colours and right angles. The lack of Mans interference and right angles equalling right morals seems important. He was in Holland when the Nazis invaded and he made his way by subterfuge to New York. The paintings he painted here are his most energetic. His least monastic and obsessive. Not with the colour (that remained primary) but the form. The thick lines moved closer together and the colours piled on top of each other boldly. Much less less radical then Maleviches change it can be viewed as similar .

Martin

Agnes Martin was born in Saskatchewan . She moved to New York after college and felt stifled and scared. She fled to Venice and then New Mexico where she has been painting for 30 years. There is a similarity to Saskatchewan , Venice and New Mexico that shows in her work. Her work is simple and luminous. It is often lines in grey shades on variously hued paper and canvas. The similarity that i see in these three places and her work is a holy light. A beauty that slips quickly from your fingers. It is the dawn on sand or ocean or grass fields. A hymn to somber reflection .

Rothko

There are three telling anecdotes concerning Rothko . The first is he is one of the few artists to have a chapel in his name filled with his work. The Second is that he demanded the lighting to be dim and the spacing to be wide when you viewed his work. He considered all of his paintings intimitly connected.
The third was that you took off your shoes when you visited his studio. Often in his paintings there are two colours in the same ranges bleeding, melting , melding into each other and a third colour providing a contrast . It seemed to be a metaphor for finding a way outside of the world. A distancing.

Serra

Serra bisects spaces. He makes the land his own. His early work consisted of almost toppling towers or pell mell piles of Cor Ten. His most famous work was removed because it was inconvienent to office workers. They had to move around a swerving 15 foot tall piece of steel. Serra guides you to awareness. We are blind, we walk with one foot in front of the other to our usual places. Being made to move by 20 tonnes of steel is a fairly obvious shake out of complacency. It does not seem simple but the grace in which he presents it is surprising.

Marfa
flavin and judd

Donald Judd bought an abandoned army base in Marfa. It had mysterious lights that came from the heavens on lucky nights , as well as sun baked prairies amid huge hangers that were beautiful in their concrete and glass utility . He filled it with art that undercut and commented on where they were. Flavin made serial boxes ( often stacked one on top of the other ) painted garish colours or made of galvinzed steel or glass. Flavin makes work out of neon and fluorescent light. He lives in his space and finds ways to distort and shine through it . The colours he uses provide odd shadows which are as much a part of the work as the objects themself. . Judd and Flavin were best friends but had a fight and had not talked in 15 years. When Judd died , Flavin was asked to do a major project at Marfa. He chose to light hallways , entrances and stairwells. The dark dank places where people go for utility now have human created recreations of those Unearthly Lights.