Contact Us

Staff

Bringing the East to the West where the twain meet in art

By Hope Green

It amuses John Stomberg to watch the reactions of visitors as they enter the Boston University Art Gallery, where he is curator of the current exhibition, Looking East: Brice Marden, Michael Mazur, and Pat Steir.

	Brice Marden, The Attended, 1996-1999. Oil on linen, 82"x 57".

"They're all very different painters," he says, "and every time someone enters the room, it switches as to which painter the person responds to."

Some linger at the works by Brice Marden (CFA'61), their eyes tracing the patterns made by undulating, linguine-like strands that twist and loop to the margins of each canvas. Others stop and meditate on the ethereal mists and waterfalls of Pat Steir (CFA'60), or on the molten dreamscapes of Michael Mazur, which only hint at forms of mountains, boulders, and branches.

Yet in spite of their different approaches, each of these internationally recognized artists has played a significant role in reviving Western art's connection to the Far East, particularly to China. In the process, says Stomberg, director of the gallery, they have taken their work into a spiritual realm.

"I'm not saying these are religious paintings," he says. "I'm saying this is a way of extending modern art by creating an aesthetic experience that people respond to at a very irrational level.

"It can be transcendent for people; it can have a psychological and emotional effect of taking a person out of ordinariness and creating something special," Stomberg says. "And I think the apprehension of these paintings requires a suspension of disbelief to a certain extent, and allowing yourself to be open to them and study them. They don't reveal themselves immediately."

East-West hybrids
Western artists have incorporated Asian styles and techniques into their work at different periods since the 1860s, says Stomberg, but the Looking East artists draw on that legacy in entirely new ways. All three painters, East Coast natives who were born at roughly the same time and studied with some of the same teachers, became fascinated with the art of China in the 1980s after pursuing very different paths. Marden made his reputation as a minimalist in the 1960s and 1970s, Mazur turned to realism, and Steir became a leader in the postmodernist movement.

Michael Mazur, Dragon's Rockery, 1997-1998. Oil on canvas, 60"x 80".

Marden, says Stomberg, was a master of the monochrome canvas, painting mainly in shades of gray. By the mid-1980s, he began to paint with twigs and branches, a technique that introduced curved, sketchy, intertwining lines into his work. Marden credits this change to a 1984 visit to an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy in New York. His interest in the subject eventually led him to pursue a study of Chinese poetry and Eastern philosophy.

"In his recent paintings," Stomberg says, "Marden attempts to capture the spirituality and rhythm of calligraphy and re-create its forms without making direct references to specific Chinese characters. He wants his paintings to transcend the meaning associated with the Chinese characters and poetry that had inspired them. His work reflects the Zen idea of emptying out meaning in order to gain a deeper, more universal understanding of life and art."

Text or texture
Steir's latest work, Stomberg says, in some ways contradicts the postmodern doctrine, although earlier in her career she would frequently incorporate graphs, numerals, and notations into her paintings.

"Postmodern critics thought both painting and the modern project were dead," Stomberg explains. "Postmodern painters took the position that since there was no inventiveness left, their work would be witty and ironic rather than serious and heartfelt. They believed painting was a text to be carefully read and not something to be experienced."

	Pat Steir, Sixteen Waterfalls of Dreams, Memories, and Sentiment, 1990. Oil on canvas, 78.5"x 151.125".

But Steir was always deeply interested in art history. Like Marden, she went to China in the early 1980s, and in borrowing ideas from the East she found a new, authentic means of expression. She, too, was drawn to Chinese philosophy, and Stomberg points to her Sixteen Waterfalls of Dreams, Memories, and Sentiment (1990) as an example. The work is part of a series of waterfall paintings in which she strokes or pours thinned paint onto the canvas and lets it stream down in cascades. At times she also throws the paint with her brush, a technique similar to the centuries-old flung-ink tradition in Chinese calligraphy.

"There is this wonderful idea in Chinese philosophy about the waterfall, which is that it's never really a thing at all, yet it is a thing -- a movement that's nothing solid, yet it is something you can see," Stomberg says. "It's one of these perfect Zen conundrums, a beautiful way of contemplating the impermanence of life in a waterfall. Pat has a lot of Chinese philosophy packed into her work."

Emotion and tranquility
Mazur made a trip to China in 1987 and then in 1993 began a study of Chao Meng-fu (1280-1368), a Yuan dynasty master of landscape. Subsequently his work improvised on themes in these ancient scroll paintings, but he moved away from linear mark-making, using swatches of color and layers of glazes in place of clearly recognizable shapes.

"This is pure fantasy," Stomberg says. "It doesn't refer to a specific place, as the impressionist painters did, but rather to an emotional place that one has achieved by climbing these mountains and looking at these mists and these bodies of water."

Around the time Stomberg thought of grouping the three painters in one exhibition, he read about a concept the Chinese call the three perfections in art: calligraphy, painting, and poetry. Of the three painters, he says, Mazur most strongly represents poetry.

"Poetry works by using words to evoke specific images to allude to larger emotions," Stomberg says. "Think of the emotional reaction we have when we hear 'moonlight on the new-fallen snow,' and then think what happens if we bring in a word like 'blood.' Michael Mazur is a visually allusive painter. By showing us a tree, branch, waterfall, fog, or mountain, he's bringing us into this emotional world very much the way poetry does."

The three artists on exhibit, says Stomberg, are proving that abstract expressionism is not finished, that the well of innovation in modern art has not run dry.

"They are showing us that paint can be more than paint on canvas, and can lead people to a glimpse, a moment, a hint of something spiritual," he says. "There are no words for this -- all three painters operate in a place where words fail."

Looking East: Brice Marden, Michael Mazur, and Pat Steir is at the BU Art Gallery, 855 Commonwealth Ave., through February 24. Hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m. For more information, call 353-4672.

1 February 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations