When did you first know you wanted to be an artist?

I loved to draw ever since I could finger-paint and scribble with a crayon. I soon fell in love with comic books and, at age twelve, knew I wanted to make a career of drawing stories.

How did the people closest to you react when you chose that path?

My parents identified my passion for drawing and encouraged me. My father is a writer, and my mother was the deputy director of the New York State Council for the Arts. I was surrounded by different kinds of artists, actors, and creators. It’s in my blood.

Which artists have mattered most to you?

Not counting filmmakers, writers, and singer-songwriters/musicians, I love painters like Edward Hopper, Pablo Picasso, and Max Beckmann. But the one artist I’m perpetually inspired by is the late, great cartoonist Jack Kirby, co-creator of the Marvel Universe and a plethora of other characters. His unbridled imagination and prescient designs have illustrated some of America’s greatest mythologies.

I’d like to also add the comics art of C.C. Beck, Steve Ditko, Frank Robbins, Alex Toth, Frank Miller, Howard Chaykin, Walter Simonson, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Chester Brown (among many others).

Which artist whose work differs from yours do you most admire?

Cartoonist Ben Katchor. His loose, scratchy lines. His playful sense of composition. His humorous truths in the face of absurdity.

What art book could you not live without?

How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema. It teaches the basics of drawing and visual storytelling.

What quality do you most admire in an artist?

The ability to finish something. Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good.

Do you keep a sketchbook?

No. But I sometimes scribble on bar napkins. And I love drawing on cardboard food separators in Chinese takeout deliveries and on Fancy Feast food for cats.

What is your favorite museum?

The American Museum of Natural History. And, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What is the best exhibition you’ve ever seen?

Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera at the Brooklyn Museum in 2010–2011.

If you were not an artist, what would you be?

Since I count playwright and filmmaker as “art,” I’d be a mailman or a cook. But the smart answer is an electrician and/or plumber.

Was there an artistic circle that shaped you early on?

I made friends and produced comix with a tight group of junior high school classmates who spent their afternoons drawing antiheroes rather than doing homework. In 1985, my senior year of high school at LaGuardia, I was an assistant for Bill Sienkiewicz on New Mutants and Elektra: Assassin, and then at Upstart Studios for Howard Chaykin on American Flagg! and Walter Simonson on Thor. At that time, there were only a couple of universities teaching comix, but I got to learn hands-on by working with professional cartoonists on their books.

What is one thing you wish you’d learned in art school?

Comics. They didn’t teach comics and/or visual sequential storytelling when I was taking art classes at Music & Art High School, which became LaGuardia High School in my senior year.

What work of art have you looked at most?

A page I sometimes ogle for inspiration is an action-packed, rock-’em-sock-’em ballet that Jack Kirby rendered from Tales of Suspense #85 (Marvel Comics), where Captain America battles Batroc the Leaper.

What is your secret visual pleasure outside of art?

No secret that I love theater, television, and movies. Mike Nichols’s cinematic adaptation of playwright Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, is a movie I revisit annually.

Do you listen to music while working?

I listen to lots of industrial electronic music. Prince. 1960s jazz. 1970s funk and soul. 1980s hip hop. Ambient movie soundtracks that lean into horror. And podcasts. I love to hear people talk.

What was the last gallery or exhibition you visited?

OAX 2026—the Original Art Expo in Orlando, Florida—of which I was also a guest.

Which underrated artist should more people know?

Jen Ferguson is a painter and private art teacher, and the sole artist at the Blue Ribbon restaurants, where she whimsically interprets wine, cheese, crudités, birds, sea life, and the beasts we eat. Also, her apocalyptic Brooklyn Bridges and ambient landscapes foment a meditative sense of solitude and serenity.

What materials can you not live without?

Pencil, pen, and paper.

Do you make art every day?

Yes. More writing than drawing.

What is the longest you’ve gone without making art?

A week?

What do you do when you feel uninspired?

Read comix and books. Watch movies. Listen to music. Visit a museum. Steep in other people’s art. Enjoy nature. Touch grass. Dip your legs into the ocean. More importantly, work on something else. Crack a different idea. One thing often informs the other.

What questions drive your work?

Desire. Fear. Trouble. Purpose. Change. Excavating emotional gold. Discovering the unexpected. And what makes human connections.

What is the most important quality in an artist?

Personal expression despite criticism.

What have you not yet achieved in art?

Writing and directing a feature film.

What is the best thing about making art in the age of social media?

The broad potential to be seen and heard (for better or for worse).

Dean Haspiel, who publishes on Substack, will teach a workshop, Comix Fundamentals: Writing in Pictures and Drawing Narratives, at the Art Students League, April 28–30, 2026.

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When did you first know you wanted to be an artist?

I never really knew. I grew into it. I’ve been in art school since elementary school, and I’ve never known the world without art. My original interest was to do comic books, but then I took my first figurative painting class at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), and that’s when I lost interest in making comics full-time.

How did the people closest to you react when you chose that path?

If “the people closest” refers to family, they’ve really had no reaction or interest—they don’t even ask me what I do. Art is sadly far, far removed from their reality. My father was supportive of any path I chose (it wouldn’t have mattered what I did), so he never discouraged or dissuaded me from attending art school or from trying to make a living as an artist. That said, his career advice for “being an artist” is very pragmatic and not at all aligned with my interest in sincerity.

Which artists have mattered most to you?

Those who have been sincere. Artists who have shown compassion and empathy in their work, such as Gustav Courbet and Léon Augustin Lhermitte.

If by “mattered most” you mean favorite painters, they include Tintoretto, Veronese, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Tiepolo, Hokusai, Sargent, Klimt, Schiele, Burt Silverman, Max Ginsburg, Irwin Greenberg, and Ron Sherr.

If by “mattered most” you mean most influential, the two works that have had the greatest impact on me are Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait (1660) and Tiepolo’s The Death of Hyacinthus (ca. 1752–53), which I saw in 1997. Tiepolo’s painting influenced me most. Rembrandt’s self-portrait revealed humanity and vulnerability, a weighted, lived experience that I could relate to and was beginning to recognize in others, and made it a prerogative for me to explore that depth in my painting of people. Feeling that connection with others became therapeutic.

However, my upbringing was filled with comics, movies, and special-effects extravaganzas. When I discovered Tiepolo—his orchestrated compositions of light and shadow, his use of complementary color, his heroic mythological and biblical scenes with large casts filling vast spaces—he became the larger-than-life painter I wanted to be, before I reconciled ego with humility.

Which artist whose work differs from yours do you most admire?

Picasso.

What art book could you not live without?

How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema. This technique book above all others for a simple reason: it is an ultimate, lowest common-denominator, Cliff Notes version of all the important lessons that really should be properly learned from studying art history. As George Bridgman distilled Gerome’s lessons at the École des Beaux-Arts, which in turn were distilled by Andrew Loomis (who wrote industry bibles for artists), these were further distilled into How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way in the 1970s. The hundreds of copycat art books since don’t have the same spirit, substance, or enthusiasm. How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way is the most pragmatic instructional guide and doesn’t presume its audience is interested in being especially intellectual or deep. It cuts to the chase by helping the artist to have fun in finding a better voice as a storyteller. It works as a basic introduction for younger art students, informs commercial studio artists, or challenges someone who might be trying to create mega-compositions.

What qualities do you most admire in an artist?

Perseverance, sincerity, and humility.

Do you keep a sketchbook?

Yes and no. I mostly use a sketchbook for figure sketching in the studio, but when I travel, I only occasionally work in it. Sadly, I don’t work in it enough.

What is your favorite museum?

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, probably has the best collection in the US, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art a close second. It’s been over twenty years since visiting the Uffizi Galleries, the Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze, or Louvre, and thirty years since the Prado. I mention these because I’d have to reserve judgment on my favorite until I revisit them and think about all of them side by side. That said, some of the very best artworks in the world aren’t in museum collections, such as the Roman and Venetian artwork housed in churches, and the Buddhist shrines and murals found in monasteries and temples around the world.

What is the best exhibition you’ve ever seen?

Best or favorite?  My favorite special exhibition was the Michelangelo show a few years ago, Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman & Designer. “Best” could be any permanent collection in any of the above museums and more.

If you were not an artist, what would you be?

Worm food.

Was there an artistic circle that shaped you early on?

My art classes in high school during junior and senior years included people I’d known for six years, but I didn’t connect visually with anyone there. None of us were pursuing a similar subject, using the same materials, or developing the same interests, and nobody in Miami, if not most of Florida, where I grew up, was thinking about pursuing representational work, so I was alone and really struggled to find a place. An artistic circle didn’t really form until I found a group of peers at SVA who were part of the Irwin Greenberg/Max Ginsburg group, which eventually led me to the Art Students League. Then, while working in Ron Sherr’s class, the circle or bond we formed in Studio 7 was really tight. But in the twenty years since class disbanded, we’ve all drifted apart. But when we do reconnect, it’s like time never passed.

What is one thing you wish you’d learned in art school?

How to self-introduce or approach galleries and exhibition spaces.

What work of art have you looked at most?

Single artwork? Not sure. I’m not sure if I would say the various movie posters by Drew Struzan or Bob Peak, Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait. Sargent’s watercolors from Venice, Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja, Regnault’s Salome, Delacroix’s Death of Sardanopolus, Tiepolo’s The Death of Hyacinthus, or maybe Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.

What is your secret visual pleasure outside of art?

People-watching while traveling, looking at all sorts of food markets and kitchens, Buddhist shrines in temples, and martial arts and wuxia films.

Do you listen to music while working?

Sometimes. A range from Bollywood to classical Indian sitar to Buddhist chants to rock. But if I’m painting at home, I often listen to Howard Stern or play movies (preferably with a lot of talk), which serve as background music. Also, BBC Radio.

What was the last gallery or exhibition you visited?

Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson at the Metropolitan Museum.

Which underrated artist should more people know?

Léon Lhermitte.

What materials can you not live without?

In context, if I were to go traveling, in or out of NYC, and was forced to reduce my materials to the barest, most essential that I felt I could do the most with, it would be: sketchbook, pencils, burnt sienna watercolor, a watercolor brush, and a jar for water.

Do you make art every day?

The physical act of drawing and painting—no, sadly, my teaching schedule takes up most of my time—but just passing through an everyday commute or daily job, I see hundreds of moments that could be potential “art.” In my mind’s eye, I’m drawing and painting all the time, every moment, every face. Everything is a study of colors, shapes, textures, gestures, and expressions.

What is the longest you’ve gone without making art?

Perhaps after my first trip to India, when I spent many days and weeks just writing about art. I wanted to pursue creative writing for a bit to see if I could paint with words.

What do you do when you feel uninspired?

Chuck Close said, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just get to work.”

What questions drive your work?

Lao Tzu wrote, “There is a universe in a blade of grass,” so my overarching question is likely, “What is there to be discovered within the universe of the subject before me?” As primarily a portraitist, the questions that arise now are: “Who is this?” “Why are they this way?” “How did they get here?” “What might they be feeling right now?” “What did they experience in the hours, days, weeks, months, and years before we met?” and “What will they experience after we part ways?” In my mural phase, however, the question was, “How can I create as grand a story as Tiepolo, Veronese, Tintoretto, or Rubens?”

What is the most important quality in an artist?

Compassion, empathy, forgiveness, sincerity, perseverance, commitment, dedication, and humility.

What have you not yet achieved in art?

The proper work-life balance that would allow me to paint more. Also, the ability to capture a location or moment at the same speed and accuracy as Sargent.

What is the best thing about making art in the age of social media?

Finding others and connecting with those on a similar wavelength, inspiring each other.

RICHARD WEINSTEIN (@richard_weinstein) teaches painting workshops at the Art Students League of New York.

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Introduction

Born in the Bronx, Ronnie Landfield grew up in New York. This fourteen-year-old, who often visited 57th Street and the legendary galleries in Manhattan, was certain of one thing: he did not want to become a commercial artist, but rather an artist in the lineage of the first-generation pioneers: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. Painting, for him, was not a profession to be adapted to external demands, but a way of life expressed through material, touch, and decision. This conviction shaped both the form and the ethics of his work.

Lyrical Abstraction is a branch of Abstract Expressionism that emphasizes gesture, rhythm, emotional brushwork, and a poetic sensibility. Poetry functions here as an unspoken metaphor, visually achieved through two main channels: imagery and openness. Together, these qualities allow the work to breathe, sustaining the tension between what is shown and what is withheld.

Within this lineage, New York-based Landfield, alongside London’s John Hoyland, emerges as a leading figure, articulating the movement’s poetic and emotional possibilities within distinct cultural and spatial contexts. Landfield’s paintings are sites where expansive color, rhythmic structure, and emotional resonance converge, transforming landscape, memory, and sensation into a distinctly lyrical abstract language.

To situate Landfield’s practice within a broader art-historical field, I traveled to London to visit the studio of John Hoyland and to speak with his widow, Beverley Heath Hoyland, extending the conversation beyond a single voice to a wider Lyrical Abstract tradition, though no additional topics emerged.

Wei Wei (WW): Mr. Landfield, thank you for welcoming me into your studio. It’s an honor to visit and to learn about your different periods of work. I’m grateful for the opportunity to record this conversation.

Ronnie Landfield (RL): I’m very pleased to have you here and to show you my studio. Thank you for taking the time to talk about my work.

WW: Visually speaking, your paintings have a distinctive poetic rhythm and variation. The relationships between lyrical color and layered passages show both control and expressive force. How do you approach color, and how does it shape your work?

RL: In the world I live and work in, I’m trying to express how I feel about life, about the past, the future, and, most importantly, the present. Over time, I learned that color is a language: yellow, blue, red, orange, green, brown, black, tan. It’s an emotional and psychological language that can express things words often can’t.

Through shape, form, and color, you can express a life. You can use intensity and variations, light, pale, deeper and deeper, to tell stories. For me, abstract paintings relate to our lives and to the universe: how I feel, how you feel. That’s the hope.

It’s not only about my feelings. It’s also about how someone looking at the painting feels through color, form, space, surface, scale, and size. Color becomes a tool that can guide a viewer toward their own feelings. I want the audience to feel their own lives and recognize something in themselves. 

Landscape, Structure, Emphasizing “Painterly,” and Finding Your Own Voice

WW: Many of your large-scale works carry the spirit of Abstract Expressionism while defining Lyrical Abstraction. They seem to have been distilled from the scenery, originating from nature but rising above it. Could you describe your philosophy and methods, especially in terms of scale, paint, and the translation of landscape into abstraction?

RL: When I first fell into painting, I realized I was painting my life. I also understood that I had to define what a painting meant for me, without accepting what experts insisted it should be.

Their message was essentially, “No, you shouldn’t do painting.” My response was: Don’t listen to them. Listen to yourself. The purpose is to find your own voice. This connects to what I was already sure of when I was fifteen, wandering around 57th Street: I didn’t want to be a commercial artist. I wanted to be a painter.Rather than thinking in terms of isolated images, my understanding of painting gradually took shape around foreground, middle ground, and background. This became one of the central structural ideas in my work, a way of keeping a painting alive rather than treating it as a flat object. For me, the background can open into infinity, while the middle ground sustains complexity without becoming literal.

At the same time, there was a clear resistance to locking myself into Minimalism or hard-edge logic as ends in themselves. What mattered was remaining painterly. “Painterly” is one of my central words because it means that a painting has lived through paint, through touch, through the physical intelligence of the material.

That commitment led me toward staining and pouring, allowing paint to form itself, to run and happen. Through this process, I came to understand how flow behaves by lifting and angling the canvas, guiding the movement of paint without forcing it.

Around the age of twenty-one, I moved toward larger stains, stretching the canvases to eight, nine, or even ten feet. At that point, I realized the paintings needed a stronger foreground presence, which led me to introduce a hard-edged band. With that, I could feel both the finite (foreground, middle ground, background) and infinity within a single work.

WW: So the contrast between the finite and the infinite becomes a way to express life, one that feels right to you while keeping the work painterly at its core?

RL: Exactly. I remember that around October 1969, as I was preparing for my first one-man show, an art critic visited my studio and remarked that my paintings, including Diamond Lake, looked like a Chinese landscape. I took that as a meaningful recognition: I could relate to older traditions across distance and time. I also knew I needed something distinct in my own vocabulary, and that was where bands and geometry entered, not as Minimalism, but as a framework within a painterly language.

In other works, such as Elijah, also in my first show and later shown in Beijing, I introduced calligraphic elements within the band. The more intense color, especially within the band, helped emotionally define the painting. I was also influenced by Kenneth Noland, who told me that color is a psychological language, which confirmed what I already felt.

Landscape mattered to me precisely because I kept hearing it was old-fashioned and dead. That resistance made it more compelling. I pursued it in my own way, without illustration and without trying to become Monet.

WW: Your work often holds together hard-edge geometry, expressive brushwork, and multiple textures. When you combine these different elements, how do you keep them coherent?

RL: When they’re harmonious, they’re harmonious. When they’re different, that can be okay too. The hope is that the elements keep working against and with each other, creating a tension that holds the painting together. Otherwise, it fails.

WW: When did the stain paintings and certain technical procedures become central?

RL: I began making stain paintings around 1968, working on the floor. Some large works used extensive tape and hand-painted lines, every line done by hand with tape and brush. The paintings could evoke mountains, forests, or other landscapes without becoming a literal description.

Elijah was part of my first one-person show at David Whitney Gallery, not the museum. Diamond Lake entered MoMA’s collection. I understand Elijah was shown in Beijing and later held by the U.S. State Department; at one point, I heard it was in Cuba. I hope it has remained safe.

Lyrical Abstraction as a Historical Position

WW: When did “lyrical abstraction” become a meaningful term for you?

RL: From the mid-1960s, many critics claimed painting, and especially Abstract Expressionism, was over. Pop Art, Op Art, and Conceptualism were treated as the future. But for many of us, Abstract Expressionism was spirit and soul, a human expression. It was about feeling, like jazz, rock, folk, something internal.

We had given up on Minimalism and the exactitude of “It’s only this.” We embraced the sense that it might be this too, and that it could be many things together. We began to be called lyrical abstractionists in the early 1970s. The term had previously described certain European Abstract Expressionist tendencies, and it resurfaced. For years, people mocked it until it became clear that lyrical abstraction was real.

In my view, many major painters made lyrical work in one form or another, from Arshile Gorky to Helen Frankenthaler, and then artists of my generation: Dan Christensen, Larry Poons, Brice Marden, Peter Reginato, and others. I wrote and assembled work around this history because it mattered to me.

Influences: Poetry, Odetta, and McLuhan

WW: You’ve spoken about poetry and music as parallel languages to painting. Could you describe what you found there?

RL: Poetry, especially certain kinds, felt close to abstraction: one word, then another, building leaps and leaving space for imagination. When I was about twenty-one, around 1968, I worked for Something Else Press, owned by Dick Higgins and Allison Knowles, and met poets connected to concrete poetry. That experience helped me clarify where I wanted to go in painting.

The press’s owner disliked color and preferred black and white, because the word on the page was black and white. I found that contrast revealing.In those days, I listened to Bob Dylan constantly. Another foundational influence was Odetta. Hearing her when I was young changed my life. She gave me something I needed as I was starting out.

These experiences also relate to McLuhan’s concepts about how a medium shapes perception. In painting, the medium is not neutral. Paint has its own intelligence, and that returns to my central concern with being painterly.

Mid-1960s New York: Loss and Breakthrough

WW: When you first came of age in New York, what shaped you most, and which early circles mattered?

RL: Friends were crucial at the beginning. Very few of us had money, and very few knew where we were going, except that we were following our instincts.

As a New York City kid, I spent a lot of time looking. I visited galleries while still young: the Green Gallery, Leo Castelli Gallery, and Andre Emmerich Gallery. I saw Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Ron Davis, and I saw Larry Poons at the Green Gallery. I learned by watching and by being in the city.

When I went to California, I met artists who were essentially classmates at the time. I met Peter Reginato at the San Francisco Art Institute, and others. I stayed about a year and then returned to New York at eighteen, thinking I could handle the New York art world.

Back in New York, the community was built through shared studios, shared rent, and constant looking at one another’s work. Those practical realities, and the need for conversation, were part of the culture.

WW: You’ve mentioned a fire early on. What happened, and what did it change?

RL: In February 1966, when I was nineteen, I went to a Warhol film screening where the Velvet Underground played live. Afterward, I went downtown to paint, and my building had burned down. The studio was gone.

Friends helped salvage what they could. Peter Young helped rescue sculptures by my friend Michael, with whom I was sharing the loft on Broadway between Spring and Broome streets; Dan Christensen helped me pull out what I could and store it at his loft. I was angry, and I drew obsessively.

Out of the blue, I contacted Philip Johnson, the architect and art collector connected to the Museum of Modern Art. He met with me and said, essentially: You should be in school. I told him I didn’t want school; I wanted to make art. He said: Make work, then come back and show it; get a job and rebuild your studio situation.

I talked my way into a commercial art job on 57th Street (advertising), which gave me income and materials. Soon after, I moved into a shared studio situation again, on Great Jones Street with Dan Christensen.

I began making the large border paintings, each measuring 6 by 9 feet. I called Philip Johnson; he saw the work and bought one painting for $700. My rent was about $100 a month. That painting later entered a museum collection in the Midwest, the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska. After that, I quit my commercial job and continued making the work.

WW: Looking back at the late 1960s, how did you communicate with peers and friends, especially those whom you encountered beyond New York, like Peter Reginato and others? I have interviewed Mr. Reginato and published an essay about him, and I understand you have been friends for about six decades.

RL: Peter Reginato was a close friend in San Francisco. I kept telling him, why are you there? Come, come to New York! This is where it’s happening. Eventually, he came, driving across the country, accompanied by Michael Heizer. We threw a big party, and within days, they found the loft on Greene Street. This was fall 1966, and Peter still lives there. Michael Heizer later became a legendary figure associated with large-scale work and site-specific sculptures in the American Southwest.

Ivan Karp, Dorothy Herzka, the 1967 Group Show, and the Whitney Annual

WW: How did the first major breakthrough happen?

RL: One day, I went to a Warhol show at Leo Castelli Gallery carrying a book of drawings. Ivan Karp, who ran the gallery, called me over, looked at the drawings, and gave me a number to call, saying they were looking for young artists. Donald Judd was standing there at the time.

I called and was invited to the Bianchini Gallery on 57th Street, where I met Dorothy Herzka, a talented woman who later married Roy Lichtenstein. She saw my drawings and then came to my studio to see the larger border paintings. She proposed that I curate a group show of myself and friends at her gallery.

We organized the show for March 1967, including Peter Young, Dan Christensen, Ken Showell, Peter Gourfain, and me. Around that time, I was between spaces and stayed briefly at 60 Greene Street. I then began to rent a loft at 94 Bowery. After that show, we were all invited into the Whitney Annual (1967). I showed Howl of Terror. I was about twenty years old and began to paint new and larger paintings.

Los Angeles Peer Networks and the First One-Man Show

WW: At what moment did you begin to sense that your work was being recognized not only within your immediate circle, but across a broader artistic network? How did that shape the early visibility of your large-scale stain paintings and contribute to your first sustained engagement with the gallery system?

RL: In late 1968, after I had begun making my large-scale stain paintings, my neighbor and friend Peter Young returned to New York after his solo show at the Nick Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles. At the time, we were both living at 94 Bowery. I was on the top floor, and Peter Young was on the ground floor. Peter told me that while in Los Angeles, he had met artists making work with a style similar to mine.

In early 1969, I flew to Los Angeles and met Bill Pettet, who was making some really cool large-scale stained abstract paintings. He was friends with Ron Davis, whom I had first met in 1964 and whose abstract work I deeply admired. During that visit, I encouraged Bill to move to New York. Not long afterward, both Bill and I were included in an important print portfolio called NY 10.

Actually, several months earlier, around August 1968, Peter Young brought David Whitney to my loft to see my new paintings. Peter had told me that Whitney often advised Philip Johnson on what to collect. When David came into the studio, to my shock and delight, he purchased two paintings, each measuring 9 × 10 feet, Cheat River and St. Augustine. It completely blew my mind and was a tremendous help at that moment.

After visiting Bill Pettet and Ron Davis in Los Angeles, we went out to dinner together. To my surprise, David Whitney appeared as well. We all had dinner—Bill and his wife, Ron, Nick Wilder, David Whitney, and me. I soon learned that David had purchased twelve or thirteen of Bill’s new paintings, a decision that strongly encouraged Bill to move to New York.

A few months later, back in New York, Bill and I were finishing our prints for the NY 10 portfolio when David Whitney came by and announced that he had decided to open a gallery. He invited me to have my first one-man show, which was also the first solo exhibition at the David Whitney Gallery.

WW: When you were a booming artist, which dealers and galleries mattered most, and what did that scene feel like?

RL: In that era, certain dealers felt legendary: Dick Bellamy (also known as Richard Bellamy) at the Green Gallery, Leo Castelli Gallery, and André Emmerich Gallery. At Emmerich, I saw colorfield painters; at Castelli, Pop and hard-edge; at the Green Gallery, artists like Larry Poons and early Pop developments.

As a teenager, I saw how the art world could explode. In 1962, the Sidney Janis Gallery staged New Realism and introduced a wave of Pop and related work by Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, George Segal, and Claes Oldenburg. Many artists associated with Abstract Expressionism and their estates reacted strongly. The art world became polarized, and major allegiances shifted.

I also remember the Samuel Kootz Gallery as important, associated with Hans Hofmann. Hofmann mattered because he was central to how that generation understood painting, and I remember the gravity of that presence in the gallery world.

Barter, Survival, and “Knocking on Doors”

WW: Before galleries fully supported your work, how did you manage to continue your practice as an artist?

RL: But I still needed galleries to take my work seriously. I wasn’t Picasso. They weren’t knocking on my door; I had to knock on theirs. I felt shy about dealing with dealers, even when I was confident about my work.

Larry Poons and Painterly Risk

WW: Your friendship with my mentor Larry Poons seems pivotal. How did it begin, and what did you learn from each other?

RL: My painting in the Whitney Annual in 1967 was hung opposite Larry Poons’ work. Soon after, we met in a bar; he introduced himself and invited me to his studio. We became friends.

I liked his painting because it was painterly. This matters because “painterly,” the insistence on painting-ness and the living intelligence of paint, is one of my central words. His earlier paintings had been very geometric, and here I was seeing something looser.

In his studio, I told him, sort of provocatively, that he was making the same painting repeatedly: changing the ground color, then placing ellipses or related marks on top. Larry went to the corner, picked up a five-gallon container of green paint, and smashed it onto a large purple painting, letting it pour and run. He said, “You’re right, kid.” After that, he moved away from that geometric approach and began a more thrown, gestural method.

Critics could be contradictory. Some said my work was too beautiful, therefore bad. They said Larry’s was not beautiful enough, therefore bad. But we both did what we needed to do.

We also talked about music. Larry has been deeply connected to music; we talked about composers and intensity in art. My own sense is that the shift from “beauty” to power, gesture, and how the risk can be essential for our works.

Teaching: Bennington, SVA, and the Art Students League

WW: Teaching became another dimension of your practice. We have an old saying in China: Teaching and learning complement each other. So how did it begin, and what has it given you?

RL: My initiation into teaching came through Larry Poons. Around 1968, he had a teaching job at Bennington College in Vermont and didn’t want to go, so he suggested I do it. I was very young. I taught without grading; the school paid Larry. I learned I could go into a studio, look at work, talk seriously, and help students move forward.

Later, in 1975, I joined the faculty at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), teaching fourth-year fine arts. I taught there from 1975 to 1990. Around 1990, enrollment declined, and painting was widely declared dead; many faculty were cut, and I stopped teaching. In the early 1990s, the economy was difficult, and I needed stability for my children, including health insurance. An assistant of mine, Nicole, later left for medical school, but before leaving, she wrote letters to art schools offering my services.

In 1994, the Art Students League of New York called me for a meeting and offered me a teaching position. I began teaching an all-day Saturday class, later adding Sunday.

WW: As I know, when you were teaching, your class had models. What makes you feel that when you paint abstract, you still need models to draw figurative works?

RL: Having a model was essential for me. One of the most important artists I learned from when I was young was Richard Diebenkorn. I met him in 1965, just before I left California. I once asked him why he painted figurative work when he could be abstract. He smiled and said, “You’re right, kid.” About a year later, much of his work became abstract. I learned a great deal from his use of the figure.

Even when I was making abstract paintings, I continued drawing the figure. Figure drawing was the only class I ever really went to, because it’s good for the hand and the eye. You don’t have to invent anything; you just draw what’s there. That discipline helped my abstract painting. You can see it in my early work, including the portraits I used to make.

So when I taught at the League, I insisted on having a model. It helped abstract painters and figurative painters alike. If someone didn’t know what to paint, they could draw the figure. And when they were ready to move on, I could help guide them. So having a model mattered because figure drawing strengthens the hand and the eye. I learned from the figure’s discipline, and I wanted my students to have those skills as well. Eventually, they asked me to teach Monday through Friday as well. That’s how it all unfolded.

WW: Mr. Landfield, thank you so much for your time today and for sharing these experiences and reflections so generously. It’s been a real privilege to talk with you in the studio and to learn more directly from your work and your history.

RL: Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. You prepared a lot for this interview and asked thoughtful questions, and it’s always meaningful for me to revisit these moments and think through the work again.

Conclusion

Ronnie Landfield’s work affirms painting as a lived, painterly practice shaped through color, scale, and material decisions. Through staining, pouring, and structural bands, his paintings sustain a dynamic tension between control and openness, Spatial articulation and infinity, translating landscape into sensation rather than depiction. Equally central is the social context in which this work emerged. Landfield’s trajectory reveals the importance of peer networks, shared studios, supportive collectors, and institutions within the New York art scene of the mid-1960s and beyond. It’s an ecology in which dialogue, risk, and mutual recognition enabled artistic growth. Situated within the New York lineage of Lyrical Abstraction, Landfield’s paintings translate landscape into sensation rather than depiction, allowing memory, movement, and breath to emerge with a poetic sense.

With thanks to Ronnie and Jenny Landfield for their generosity in conversation and in providing access to studio materials.

Endnote

RONNIE LANDFIELD (ronnielandfield.com | @rlandfield) is an American abstract artist and a leading figure of Lyrical Abstraction. He teaches an online class, Drawing, Painting, Color, Design, at the Art Students League. WEI WEI (@weiwei_kassandra | @weiwei_arthistory_writer) is an abstract artist and art historian based in New York. She holds an MA in Fine Art, RCA, a PhD in Art History and has completed postdoctoral research in fine art and philosophy. 

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At what age did you decide to become an artist?

My ability to draw was discovered at eleven years old during an open-house project in elementary school.

How did your parents react when you told them you wanted to be an artist?

My parents were receptive to my creative pursuits in my pre-teen years. As I grew older and began to entertain the idea of continuing my education at the collegiate level, they began to gently guide me in a different direction. My father had served in the Air Force (including a deployment to Vietnam), and both parents were working as civil servants for the U.S. Army. Prior to attending art school, I served in the U.S. Army, which was more palatable than the concept of a career in visual art.

Who are your favorite artists?

My favorite artists are Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, and the contemporary watercolorist Stephen Scott Young. These artists work within the American Tradition of painting.

Who is your favorite artist whose work is unlike your own?

My favorite contemporary artist is Chuck Close. His later work uses elements of abstraction, which results in a frenetic sense of realism.

Art book you cannot live without?

The Helga Pictures: Andrew Wyeth (1987).

What is the quality you most admire in an artist?

Integrity.

Do you keep a sketchbook?

I don’t keep a sketchbook. I used compositional studies in my early days to make informed decisions about my finished works. In recent years, I have found that preserving my energy for a singular purpose allows me to fully execute on my original idea.

What’s your favorite museum in the world?

The Brandywine Museum of Art (Chadds Ford, PA).

What’s the best exhibition you have ever attended?

The best exhibition I ever attended was A View from the Bahamas: Watercolors by Stephen Scott Young at the NSU Art Museum (Fort Lauderdale, FL), 2004.

If you were not an artist, what would you be?

If I weren’t an artist, there’s a strong possibility I would’ve served more years in the military and pursued a civil service career.

Did you have an artistic cohort that influenced your early creative development?

I would have to credit my high school art teacher, Mrs. Louise Elvinger, for my early creative development. She offered me the opportunity to participate in a “talented and gifted” program while I was in the sixth grade. During this period, I began to develop as an artist and focused more intently on my craft.

What is one thing you didn’t learn in art school that you wish you had?

I believe I share a popular sentiment among artists: the importance of possessing a basic understanding of business. While art schools are tasked with developing a student’s knowledge of art history, technical skills, and other aspects, there’s a lack of focus on the next level.

What work of art have you looked at most and why?

I have a reproduction of Master Bedroom by Andrew Wyeth, which hangs outside the door of my home studio. The watercolor is significant, as it’s the first image I ever saw by Andy. The framed print hung outside the Department Chair’s office during my time at Pratt Institute in the early 1990s. I was awestruck by the way he used the white surface of the paper to capture light in the room. I felt that the aesthetic of watercolor would appeal to me more than the medium of oil, which I was studying at the time.

What is your secret visual pleasure outside of art?

I am fascinated by timepieces, whether it’s their aesthetic beauty or the precision of the movement.

Do you listen to music in your studio?

Yes, I generally have a broad range of musical styles playing in my studio, based on my mood.

What is the last gallery you visited?

The last gallery I visited was Pierce Galleries on Nantucket. I was interested in entering into a business relationship with the gallery and wanted to get a feel for the dealer and the work he offered.

Who is an underrated artist people should be looking at?

Henry Casselli.

What art materials can you not live without?

My Winsor & Newton Series 7, size 7 sable brush is invaluable to my practice. The versatility of the brush is impressive, from covering large areas with watercolor washes to minute details with a pointy tip. My synthetic mixing brush has gone through the wringer; however, it’s nice to have materials on which you can rely.

Do you paint art every day?

I work eight hours each day, seven days a week.

What is the longest time you went without creating art?

My mother suffered an aneurysm in 2009, which caused her to need surgery and rehabilitation. I felt that it was necessary for her to live with me during the first four months of her recovery. I was focused on her health and the day-to-day care. I hadn’t planned to put my studio practice on hold for four months; however, that’s what was required.

What do you do when you are feeling uninspired?

If I’m feeling uninspired, I won’t force the issue. I take that time to step back from art-related activities. I like to take walks, catch up on e-mails, or basically anything I avoid due to my painting schedule.

What are the questions that drive your work?

What unifies us as people? How do I celebrate the spirit of America in all its complexity? What’s the most effective way to shine light on subjects that have largely been ignored throughout the history of art?

What is the most important quality in an artist?

A relentless work ethic.

What is something you haven’t yet achieved in art?

I’m looking forward to my first solo exhibition at a major museum. I’ve participated in several group shows; however, a solo show offers a more expansive experience with the work.

What is the best thing about art in the era of social media?

Social media has offered the public the opportunity to view art from around the world, virtually in real time. There is also an unprecedented amount of information being shared by organizations.

MARIO ANDRES ROBINSON (marioarobinson.com | @marioarobinson) will be teaching, Painting the Portrait in Watercolor, March 9–13, 2026, a workshop at the Art Students League of New York.

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Sylvia Plath. Diane Arbus. Mark Rothko. Gregory Gillespie. The utterance of their names cannot help but bring to mind not only their work, but a reminder of how they chose to leave the planet: by their own hands. Twenty-five years after his tragic death, Gregory Gillespie, one of the most successful painters to ride the resurgence of realism from the 1960s through the 1980s, is having a moment. First, with the release of the documentary The Painted Life of Gregory Gillespie, a rich portrait of the artist’s life from director Evan Goodchild, followed by Forum Gallery’s museum-quality exhibition at the gallery and at the Independent Art Fair, surveying his output from the early 1960s through 1977.

Gregory Gillespie’s work has always been impossible to categorize. In both his choice of imagery and painting techniques, he may have been the most chameleonic artist to arrive in centuries. From his earlier work, heavily influenced by his six years in Italy, and his endless stream of self-portraits, each somehow resembling different people, to his later, playful 3D painting assemblages, replete with everyday objects, he was constantly in a state of reinvention. In a single work, his style could range from classical depiction worthy of the Italians he worshipped to extreme caricature, to childish scrawls and painted-over photo collages. Even the most innocuous of subjects are imbued with a palpable sense of terror, never mind the often disturbing, explicitly horrific, sometimes violent, borderline surreal, sexually fetishistic tableaux he explored in a series of small paintings. The Hirshhorn Museum’s first director, Abram Lerner, noted, “His work abounds in disturbing variations of reality, which mirror our normal experiences, but transform what is hauntingly familiar into an alarming blend of hallucination and sharp observation. Nothing is as it seems.” Gillespie’s cohort at the American Academy in Rome observed that “he definitely was the dark angel of the Academy.” Throughout his career, spirituality would be a constant theme, from the early works heavily influenced by his then-rejected Catholicism to the later explorations of Buddhism and other Eastern religions. Asked about work he painted just down the road from St. Peter’s, he stated, “The Pornographic stuff are [sic] religious paintings, definitely because they come out of a violent reaction to repression, the impulse to do sacrilege, which is a religious impulse. If you look at Christian art, what percentage of the paintings do you think involve somebody being mutilated? Maybe most of it.”

Gillespie garnered great success from an early age, earning his first Fulbright in 1962 and presenting his inaugural solo exhibition at Forum Gallery at age 30. He would go on to have over forty solo shows during his lifetime, including a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum at age 40. In a New York Times review, John Canady stated that he “might just emerge as the most important painter at work today,” comparing Gillespie’s body of self-portraits unequaled, except perhaps, to those of Van Gogh.   

Yet as his reputation grew, his work evolved in new directions, be they the mysticism of Buddhism, deeper explorations of the unconscious, and a nearly gruesome abstraction of the figure to which the public was less receptive. In addition, America was losing its infatuation with realism. 

At the time, he said, “The pieces I’m making now combine eros and death and birth. Pieces that I think of as universal symbols of everything we worship and fear. From the wombs to the tombs.” One of his last creations was his own actual tomb, replete with a shelf for his remains. (Conditions were that the buyer had to house his ashes in perpetuity in one of the many urns he also created.) He once said, “Painting is a form of prayer.”  

Many were not surprised when they heard the news of his suicide, myself among them. Suddenly, much of his work from those later years seemed prescient. Therefore, when I took my seat for the New York premiere of The Painted Life of Gregory Gillespie, I braced for the darkest of portraits and was delivered quite the opposite. Evan Goodchild presents a Gillespie with an ear-to-ear grin in every frame of footage and every photograph in which he appears. Early on, he says, “I feel like I’m one of the luckiest people on earth. I swear to God, I love doing this so much. How many people love their job so much? And I don’t feel stuck at all. You know, it just feels like it keeps getting easier and better and more fun… I can’t wait to get down here in the morning.”

This is a film as visually compelling and beautifully frenetic as the artist’s work itself. A skillfully edited montage of the artist’s paintings, recently unearthed studio interviews, and footage of him at work, animation, diary entries, photographs, and 35mm slides he labeled, the film paints a complex picture of both the oeuvre and the man himself. We meet a painter obsessed with working seven days a week, but also a generous, playful soul, a beloved central figure in the social lives of his artist peers working in western Massachusetts, organizing picnics and softball games. Along with art world insiders, Goodchild interviews Gillespie’s closest friends; chief among them Jane Lund, Scott Prior, Robin Freedenfeld, and especially his best friend, William Beckman, all of whom remain baffled some twenty-five years later over his abrupt departure from this mortal coil.

Evan Goodchild’s very involvement in the project is a nearly eerie story worthy of a Gillespie painting. He and his girlfriend, later his wife, moved into Greg’s studio in 2016 and stayed for three years. He knew close to nothing about Gillespie. “Still. We both had an intuition that he had died here in the studio, and with a little research, confirmed it.” Sometime after moving, he was recommended as the director for the documentary, no one involved having known he’d lived there. “I felt uniquely qualified to make this film. I had lived with Greg’s ghost for three years.”

We do learn that Gillespie’s mother was bipolar and was institutionalized when he was in the second grade, that his father was an alcoholic, and that he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle with whom he was not particularly close. But friends would testify that none of this would plague him as it might others. He worked those demons out in his work. Amy Lighthill, former Boston Museum curator, said, “I’m sure it was challenging to be Greg Gillespie. He knew he wasn’t like other painters. And probably that was painful for him sometimes because not everyone grasped what he was trying to do.” 

In an interview near the end, he states, “I guess I feel kind of a depression. I got people whispering in my ear ‘You are one of the best, man, in the world. Your paintings are, you know, right up there.’ There’s another part of me that thinks it’s ridiculous. I mean, the people that like them, I know there’s a lot of people that like them, but they’re just okay. You know, like, kind of like a footnote in history. Maybe if I’m lucky.” His friend William Beckman called him to say, “Your last show was a caricature of your previous work.”

Gillespie’s suicide made no sense to his friends and family. Even his therapist was shocked. Scott Prior said, “He had lots of things to complain about in his life, but he always would laugh. So to take whatever he was going through so seriously as to kill himself did not seem in character. You know, people, because of the way he died, would think, ‘Oh, the tomb. This was a premonition of suicide.’ Not true at all. He thought it would be funny and ironic, and he said, ‘I hope this winds up in some museum with my ashes in it because maybe if I couldn’t get into that museum alive, I can get into it dead.’”

Near the end of the documentary, Goodchild asks the coterie of friends what they would say to Gregory today, given the chance. Without fail, they all replied, “Why did you do it?” It just didn’t make sense. Anger is perhaps the most frustrating of emotions a suicide leaves behind, and his friends can’t help but express that. Yet the love for him and the utter worship of his work shine brightly in this film.

Contrary to other forms of art, the face of the painter is rarely seen. We feel we know the actors and musicians we admire. Even writers are forced to come out of hibernation to discuss their latest book. But with rare exceptions, such as Dali, Warhol, and Mary Boone’s bad boys of the downtown 80s, few artists have cared to cultivate public personas. Goodchild’s documentary corrects the misperception of Gillespie as a brooding soul, a time bomb, painting ever more terrifying visions until he felt the only way out was to leave. Instead, he shows us how much of the work involved play, created out of pure joy. Perhaps it’s our interpretation in the face of his suicide that would assign his entire body of work an even darker meaning.

Seeing that work in person at Forum’s carefully curated survey of his career on the heels of viewing the film, one cannot help but marvel at the contrast between the very small, early, often grotesque pieces and the gargantuan statement made with Studio Wall (Still Life with Self-Portrait), whose bright yellow glow stands in stark contrast to most of the work in the room. Asked about his use of brighter colors later in life, he replied, “At first I was scared of, like, when I started off, my colors were darker and grimmer, and I was much more interested in mood. And as I got older, I’m using the brightest reds. I can find the brightest yellows I can find. And it’s something to do with facing death, and just wanting to be a lot brighter and more intense with the color.”

His preoccupation with mortality would be a constant in his life, as his death itself would forever be for his audience. My hope is that this film might correct that focus and return it to the work where it belongs.

PATRICK KING (patrickking.org) teaches painting workshops at the Art Students League of New York.

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Even if his memorials to Martin Luther King Jr. are recognizable, the art of John Wilson (1922–2015), currently the subject of a retrospective at the Met, will still be something of a revelation to many. His drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures focused almost exclusively on African-American life and literature. Wilson’s treatment of Black life began in the years that preceded World War II and continued for a half-century, evolving from themes of disenfranchisement and racial terrorism to empowerment. As in all effective social realism, the impetus was personal. Wilson explained his motivation in 1995:

I am a [B]lack artist. I am a [B]lack person. To me, my experience as a [B]lack person has given me a special way of looking at the world and a special identity with others who experience some injustices…. I don’t sit down and think, “Well, I have to do a picture on [B]lack people today.” What I’m doing to some extent in my art is exercising some of these conflicting kinds of messages that this racist world has given me…. Some of the themes I have dealt with are not because I sat down and said I wanted to make a political statement but because of emotional experiences.

Wilson’s experiences began in the Roxbury section of Boston, where he was born to parents who had recently emigrated from British Guiana. By the mid-twentieth century, Roxbury would become the center of Black culture in Boston, but disparities were ubiquitous in a city with a reputation for racial inequality. Wilson was initially passed over for a scholarship to the city’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where white instructors only considered white students. He subsequently received a full scholarship to the school, graduating with high honors in 1945, and graduated from Tufts University in 1947. While attending classes, Wilson taught art and produced portraits and works of social commentary so good that some were quickly acquired by museums. My Brother was painted when the artist was barely twenty and snatched up by the Smith College Museum of Art the following year. Along with Wilson’s early self-portraits, it heralds his determination to present images of the Black man in the rhetoric of dignity. Wilson never surpassed the quiet power of these early works—his monumental bronze Eternal Presence and its studies, created forty years later, are the sculptural manifestation of the youthful drawings, paintings, and prints.

Early forays into social themes were more experimental and compositionally ambitious. The lithograph Streetcar Scene (1945), which places a Black laborer (presumably a stand-in for the artist) amid white women on public transit, suggests familiarity with Daumier and the Fourteenth Street School of Kenneth Hayes Miller. Wilson better captures the rhythms of urban life and labor in Street Scene (1942), Straphangers (1947) and the gouache Strike (1946). Most ambitious is the lithograph Deliver Us from Evil (1943), which equates racism with nazism. On the left is a tableau of horror from wartime Germany; at right, multiple scenes show the double standard of Black and white life in America. A public hanging on one continent is mirrored by a lynching on the other. The impact is diffused by visual overabundance, but it’s impossible to miss its timeliness. And it is a remarkable commentary and technical accomplishment by a twenty-one-year-old student.

After the war, Wilson received a traveling fellowship that was earmarked for Europe, and in 1947 he arrived in Paris. The accompanying catalogue notes that Wilson missed the “vibrant Black diasporic community” that existed between the wars, but even then there had been perhaps a dozen African American artists in Paris in fifteen years. “My whole business of being,” he explained, “of the special experience that I had as a Black person, certainly didn’t exist in France, in Europe.” Still, he maintained an active social life while corresponding with other artists.

In Paris, Wilson enjoyed the collection of African art at Musée de l’Homme, and studied with Fernand Léger. Léger’s short-term influence was obvious in Wilson’s adoption of formal qualities like two-dimensional design, primary colors, and monumental forms, as well as the emotional detachment of content. Gouaches like Man with Bicycle (1949) and Woodworker (1948) have an unequivocal force, and their faceless laborers reflect Léger’s socialist leanings. “Léger,” he recounted years later, “was really a bad teacher in that you had to be a ‘Little Léger’ to get anything from him…. There was only one way of doing it —that was Léger’s way .…” Nonetheless, the time spent in Europe bolstered his confidence as a picture maker. Over the long term, Léger’s impact can be seen in more powerfully abstracted forms—evident in the much later Richard Wright Suite of lithographs—even as Wilson returned to a more realistic and socially engaged vernacular.

If the choice of Léger as a mentor seemed at odds with Wilson’s natural inclinations, his next course of study was more sympathetic. First, he returned to Boston in 1949 and was recommended as an art camp counselor by Ernest Crichlow (whose class at the League I attended briefly in the early 1980s). Wilson also worked as an instructor at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and married Julia Kowitch in 1950. An interracial couple, they drove through the south in separate cars on their way to Mexico City, where Wilson studied mural painting and settled until 1956. He had wanted to meet the muralist José Clemente Orozco, but Orozco died before Wilson’s arrival. He enrolled at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (La Esmerelda) and made prints at the Taller de Gráfica Popular.

Though there’s a tradition of American artists pursuing their education as expatriates, five-plus years (in addition to two years in Europe) is a long stint, and expatriate life as a means of escape from racism has offered considerable appeal for Black artists. In Mexico, Wilson followed the news from the States, including the murder of Emmitt Till and the arrest of Rosa Parks. In the end, he felt compelled to return: “I wanted my work to express the experience of an African American in the States. I couldn’t do it long distance.”

While in Mexico, Wilson painted his most provocative work, a mural titled The Incident. It was, by Wilson’s account, done to exorcise the published photographs of lynchings he had seen as a child. In the fresco, a Black man’s broken and disfigured body is being handled by the robed and hooded Klansmen who killed him, while in a nearby home, a man, shotgun in hand, prepares to protect his wife, who clutches their infant child. The dual scenes refer to the Pieta and the Madonna and Child, each stripped of their sublimity. The construct of dignity disappears in the face of violence, and in a moment, the imperative to defend one’s home and loved ones takes precedence. During the pandemic, Yale University built an excellent show around The Incident, comprised of preparatory and associated works, with posted warnings that the content could trigger an emotional response.

The Incident was painted on an outside wall, and was not meant to be permanent—student murals were soon painted over by other students at La Esmerelda as a matter of routine. But there are numerous black-and-white and color studies, as well as photographs of the mural itself, from which we can attempt to assess the painting. Since the Yale show, I’ve thought about the difficulty of matching the methods of Mexican fresco with the violent content, the reduction of the figures to broad characterizations (A naturalistic rendering has its own pitfalls, chief among them a tendency toward the overly literal and kitsch). A lively, unrelated color study titled Incident appears to depict the prelude to a lynching, and communicates frenzy where the mural and its studies are labored.

That Wilson undertook the project at all was significant. The Incident could not have been exhibited publicly in the United States in 1952—over seventy years later, such a painting would hardly fare better. Its worth was recognized by David Alfaro Siquieros, then the head of Mexico’s department to preserve murals, who wanted to protect it. The Incident existed at least until the Wilsons returned to the U.S. At some later time, it was painted over.

In 1956, Wilson settled briefly in Chicago, where he worked as an illustrator. The following year, he moved his family to New York City and taught art in the public schools. An opportunity to instruct at Boston University brought Wilson back to Massachusetts for good in 1964. He taught drawing at B.U. Until 1986. After the move to Brookline, he became more involved in advocacy for Black artists, co-founding the National Center of Afro-American Artists, and served as a consultant to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

In the mid-1960s, Wilson began to explore the father-son relationship, most notably in a powerful black pastel rendering, Father and Child Reading. Emphatic graphic design lends the figures tremendous solidity in an intimate context. Father and Child Reading is drawn with a ferocity—one is tempted to say velocity—that demands the inviolability of the Black family in even stronger terms than The Incident, supported not by a shotgun but through the sharing of knowledge. At the same time, Wilson continued to illustrate books with Black subjects. In the 1970s, he embarked upon a series of life-size, full-color figure drawings in preparation for a mural. Titled The Young Americans, the models were his children and their teenage friends. Although the project was never completed, the portraits were an opportunity to draw the figure in large scale, this time with a new perspective: that of a father optimistic for the promise of the next generation. The female portraits introduce another new note, an appreciation for young women’s autonomy in their coming-of-age. One of the models became a frequent subject of Wilson’s drawings, and her bearing revitalized an idea that had long fascinated him. “I started to feel that the two-dimensional illusionistic images I was creating as a painter and printmaker were inadequate. I decided to try sculpture and chose to work in clay.” His first sculpture, the monumental head Eternal Presence, would be seven feet high.

Wilson described Eternal Presence as “a symbolic black presence infused with a sense of universal humanity.” Whatever real people inspired it, it is a synthesis of multiple sources, including Mexican art and images of the Buddha. The completed bronze was installed at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury in 1987. The version in the current show is a maquette, and like much of the work featured at the Met, it is on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Also in the mid-1980s, Wilson fulfilled separate commissions for bronze portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., the first an eight-foot monument in Buffalo, and the second a memorial bust for the United States Capitol. A series of drawings of King, in which Wilson searched for an image that would transcend likeness, preceded the memorials. In 2002, he produced a print that corresponds closely to the pastel of 1985. The heavy outlines that define King’s shoulders carry a different weight than those of earlier drawings, and speak to resignation as much as resistance. Particularly in the graphic work, King projects a disarming vulnerability.

In his major works, Wilson sought to communicate ideas to a broad public. Like other twentieth-century oracles—Kollwitz and Baskin offer loose parallels—Wilson’s expression was especially effective when distilled to black-and-white. He was above all a draftsman, and though he could apply line with variety and dexterity, he was most himself when inducing the deepest ebony from charcoal, pastel, ink, and even bronze. Blackness, in life and art, was to be preserved. Aware that its outdoor setting would alter the patina of Eternal Presence, Wilson left instructions for its maintenance, which include an annual application of black wax to its surface.

At the Met, I was perhaps fondest of unexpectedly intimate works, like The Dressing Table (1945), a portrait of Wilson’s sister that quietly subverts the tradition of white women viewed at their toilettes. A bevy of American Impressionists made livelihoods painting women seated in the boudoir, but I’m hard pressed to recall other comparable meditations on the Black woman in American painting. It would be years before Wilson returned to female subjects with regularity. On the north introductory wall are a study of Wilson’s granddaughter, Gabrielle (1998); Roz No. 9, Study for Eternal Presence (1972); Nefertiti (1976); and a splendid pastel of his older daughter, Becky (1969). Wilson’s wife appears here in a powerful charcoal study associated with The Incident, in which she assumes the guise of a Black woman. Absent from the show in New York is Julie and Becky (1956–78), a beautiful oil of Wilson’s wife and infant daughter that has the feel of an early Renaissance devotional piece.

It would be pleasant to say that Wilson’s determination to depict Black subjects with dignity shifted the cultural landscape, just as it would be nice to believe that the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s closed the book on institutional racism. To the contrary, it seems as if the same battles need to be reengaged by each generation, never more so than now. In their own ways, Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald are restating Wilson’s point, as if ignorance will be dispelled by the repetition of a moral truth. And Wilson’s art, whether confronting dehumanization and murder, commemorating the nobility of his race, or celebrating his family, remains ever relevant.

Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson has been organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It is at the Met through February 8, 2026.

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A catalogue raisonné of Uglow’s work came out in 2007, but the price and necessarily small reproductions were sticking points. I’m glad I waited. This year came the publication of The Uglow Papers, accompanied by online descriptions that looked promising. I’m guessing the officious title is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. The papers referred to are recollections of Uglow by friends, students and models, which, taken altogether, form a biography by way of anecdote. These conversations and written remembrances are compiled and edited by Andrew Lambirth, who knows the terrain and previously authored a fine monograph on Uglow’s friend and colleague, Patrick George. Though the book follows a chronological path, it’s an ideal format for skipping around and reading the short chapters non-sequentially (Images are profuse and of excellent quality, and encourage the reader to abandon a linear attack). Initially, I did just that, before eventually adopting a start-to-finish approach for the purpose of writing a review. I started, as I suspect will many readers, in the middle, with Cherie Blair’s recollections. Blair (née Booth) posed nude for Uglow while working as a junior barrister. The sessions preceded her marriage to Tony Blair, who would serve as Prime Minister of the UK.

What follows is characteristic of the book’s tone throughout: intimate without being sensational, admiring without slipping into hagiography. By Cherie Blair’s account, she was a less than reliable model, young enough to write off the experience for future reference, proof to her children that she hadn’t been a prig. Uglow comes off as an avuncular figure who left an indelible impression—Blair named her son after him. When the painting came to light in 2006 it briefly became tabloid fodder. Despite Striding Nude’s dishabille, with Blair wearing an unbuttoned minidress, the painting is anything but sexualized. It was never finished, and Uglow presciently completed a replica using a different model. The comparison is instructive on his working method. I lean toward the unfinished version—finish, per se, is less important than the crystallization of a concept. The two Striding Nude canvases were soon excelled by Zagi, a more powerful take on the theme.

Uglow first met Cherie and Tony Blair in 1976 at the home of Derry Irvine, who would later serve as Lord Chancellor. Earlier that year, he had been the subject of a television documentary that followed the process of Root Five Nude, one of his best figure pieces and a logistical headache. Using a borrowed studio—presumably chosen to preserve the sanctity of his home studio—Uglow struggled with changing light and the abdication of the original model (Working for Uglow was famously difficult—if favored, a model could count on lengthy employment, provided they could hold an arduous pose). What ensued was an audition to find another model whose body type was like that of the first, and who could hold the same demanding position for an unknown length of time. Once she was found, work continued on the painting. I’ve watched the program on YouTube several times. The charisma that inspired extraordinary dedication from students and models doesn’t fully translate in the video. What comes through is Uglow’s intellectual intensity and the integrity of his pursuit. He readily acknowledges that he paints for himself rather than the marketplace and sells little. In The Uglow Papers, his dealer Will Darby relates that Root Five Nude was sold to John Paul Getty Junior, who had been rewatching the documentary obsessively.

Well before the documentary, Uglow was a familiar presence at the Slade School of Art in London, first as a student and later as an instructor of graduate and undergraduate students. As a teenager, Uglow studied at the Camberwell School of Art before enrolling at the Slade. Among his teachers were Claude Rogers and William Coldstream, the influence of the latter especially noticeable in a meticulous attention to measuring. The role of measuring is important enough to merit a digression. Uglow’s exactitude went beyond nailing proportions. It was a way of examining optical perception, as in Nude, from 12 Regular Vertical Positions from the Eye. Titles like Double Square, Double Square; Root Five Nude; and The Diagonal suggest a geometric premise. According to Lambirth, geometry was supportive to the concept rather than foundational. “On another occasion, he said, ‘I only use geometry if I think it’s going to be to do with the idea.’ It was his aim to paint a structured picture full of controlled emotion in which every mark counted as both form and meaning. Controlled emotion, perhaps, but it was also distilled, as was the sensuality in the work. Rigorous observation can be a sensuous pleasure in its own right.”

Uglow was knocking out terrific figure studies by the time he was twenty, not just the standard school studio exercises, but compositions with an abiding interest in the way models inhabit sparse, rectilinear spaces. His student paintings are more monochromatic and freer in handling than his mature works, and reflect Coldstream’s color palette of the 1950s. The purity of Uglow’s later palette and crisp facture of the paintings would eventually distance him from Coldstream’s influence, and more generally from the pre-war realism of the Euston Road/Camberwell artists.

Teaching figured prominently in Uglow’s life, and at the risk of some anecdotal repetition, the atmosphere as both workplace and social milieu is richly evoked. He would arrive at the Slade on Friday to critique paintings that were the product of long poses. Critiques could be pointed. To a student having difficulty drawing the base of a chair, he asked, “You’re not a Cubist are you?” Laura Smith, who studied with and posed for Uglow at the end of his life, recalls him questioning students individually at the conclusion of an eleven-week pose.

“Why is it so messy?”

“Why is she in a midnight wood?”

“Why is it so boring?”

To the last question I would be hard pressed not to respond, “What do you expect after eleven weeks?” A phenomenon of Uglow’s discipline as an artist was his ability to retain freshness of color and technical clarity in a work that took years to paint.

Uglow was serious about the craft and expected his students to feel likewise. Sometimes he would stop and make an explanatory drawing. On one occasion, peering through his nearly closed fist, he demonstrated how to isolate a section of the model in an effort to match the color of a single small passage of skin. Mark Dunford, who studied at the Slade in the 1980s, remembers his patience and that “he made us all aware of the gravity of what we were trying to do.” Tony Rothon, who studied with Uglow in the 1960s and later taught at the Slade, describes a traditional instructional sequence: first measuring relationships of height and width using a brush handle, then tonal structure, and finally color saturation—drawing, value, and color.

By the 1990s, Uglow had achieved legendary status at the Slade. One student writes: “I idolised Euan – a lot of us did. I once drank the dregs of my wine that he had unwittingly used as an ashtray, and, for a moment, before spitting it out, I weirdly wondered if a little of Euan might have got into me and made me a better painter.” Conversely, Maggi Hambling, a student in the mid-1960s, recalls, “At the end of my first three weeks at Camberwell, I asked him if he’d mind not teaching me for the next three years. His work is the antithesis of anything I think of as painting.” Others are critical of the fallout from his popularity. An American who was there in 1999 describes a “fascist atmosphere” among Uglow’s students, who wouldn’t deign to talk to outsiders. Rothon takes issue with his cult-like status and for presiding over “a vast factory farm of clones.” In fairness, these criticisms could apply to successful art studios anywhere, for they raise questions about the role of imitation in the instructional process and its lasting effects on artists. When another student asked about those who painted like him, Uglow responded, “As long as they make good paintings, it’s alright.”

For someone often described as private, Uglow was a social animal who enjoyed a wide circle of friends. He was a charming host. In the evening, visitors arrived at his studio in shifts, the students during the earlier hours, the heavy hitters dropping by later. He frequented the museums and galleries and supported young artists by attending their exhibitions. Georgia Georgallas, a dear friend and the subject of one of his finest portraits, confirms that Uglow was thoughtful but also domineering—the book is otherwise discreet on the matter of his female companions. He was overly fond of cigarettes and wine, and was something of a connoisseur of the latter. A disproportionate number of reminiscences in The Uglow Papers involve pubs and other social watering holes. Uglow enjoyed cooking for friends and had very precise tastes governing the choice of food and the proper preparation of meals. After teaching, he stayed for the Friday night Slade dinners, when students blew off steam at the end of the week. He danced with Paula Rego at a school Christmas party, and reserved Thursday nights for dinners with Patrick George. Uglow was great friends with Craigie Aitchison, and was much admired by Frank Auerbach. Not every colleague was embraced. When Lucian Freud visited a Slade party and showed an interest in one of Uglow’s female students, he urged her to stay away, calling Freud “a shit.”

I think of both Uglow’s life and the goings on at the Slade during his tenure as representing a controlled bohemianism. A bit of rebellion, even dissipation, tempered but never completely quelled by the rigors of the calling. When Uglow was asked to accompany Prince Charles to the National Gallery for a televised segment, he refused to do so if it meant wearing a suit. In the end, he did the program on his terms, without a suit.

Twenty-five years after his passing and with his legacy assured, Uglow remains largely unrecognized by the general public. He found that oxymoronic sweet spot to which Degas aspired: to be famous and unknown. Perhaps The Uglow Papers will correct the imbalance. It is fascinating from beginning to end, an indispensable read for artists and a primer on the art life for anyone else. And the paintings are killer.

The Uglow Papers by Andrew Lambirth is published by Modern Art Press. https://modernartpress.co.uk/books/the-uglow-papers/

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It’s a ten-block walk from the Jewish Museum to the main entrance of the Met, and on a late spring Saturday afternoon the line to get in makes the trip feel shorter, or longer, or just aggravating for the impatient traveler. But the line moves quickly, and soon I’m inside an insanely crowded main hall and up the stairs, where it’s hardly less packed. The European galleries have been rearranged. Manet’s Young Lady in 1866 is tucked well back inside, having surrendered her place of prominence. It could be the loss of the familiar, but the charms of this reorientation are lost on me. Everything changes. At any rate, I’m on a fairly tight time budget, so I can’t indulge my weltschmerz. Onward to comfort food, Sargent and Paris. 

Sargent, or at least his critical and public standing, changes, too. For most of the twentieth century, from the First World War until the mid-1980s, he was considered an anachronism, the last relic of a bygone era. How does one reconcile the overlap of Sargent’s later society portraits with Picasso’s demoiselles, the most dextrous painter of one generation polishing traditions while the next generation’s genius violently deconstructs them? You don’t. Sargent and Paris ends at 1890, by which time the artist had managed the greatest challenge to his elegant dialect, absorbing the aspects of Impressionism that suited his style. The show opens with Sargent’s student experience in Paris and follows his subsequent journeys through the more exotic climes of Venice and Capri, with digressions for informal portraits before culminating in the early bombshell commissions. One gallery honors the Boit girls, another room is devoted to the inescapable Madame X. 

Sargent was not alone in his fascination for the woman known as Madame X—Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau was a magnet for painters, including another American expatriate who “could not stop stalking her as one does a deer.” Like Sargent, she was an American on the make in Paris, and both sought entrée to high society. Their plan backfired spectacularly when the portrait was first shown, on account of a fallen shoulder strap on Madame’s skintight dress. “One more struggle,” wrote a critic, “and the lady will be free.” Sargent repainted the strap in place and, chastened, fled to London. Though the French audience was offended by the portrait’s audacity, the scandal seems innocuous, especially in comparison to the uproar caused by Manet’s Olympia. Madame X is a painting of great panache, a turning point in Sargent’s career. When another critic called the portrait “a wilful exaggeration of every one of his vicious eccentricities, simply for the purpose of being talked about and provoking argument,” he was not entirely wrong. Sargent was hoping the attention would garner portrait commissions. His miscalculation of the marketplace was a temporary setback. Of longer duration was the balancing act Madame X announced, between style and substance. Sargent’s interest in Gautreau was skin-deep, extending as far as the elegance of her contours and powdered bodice. Once he began painting, he was exasperated by her “hopeless laziness.”

Madame X was the consummation of Sargent’s search for visually striking subjects. Among the earlier examples are a trio of portraits of a square-chinned young model with dark hair, eyes, and mustache. In these, Sargent experimented with dramatic value contrasts while modulating contours by painting wet-into-wet. A precocious facility for drawing with the brush, rather than the more methodical approach taught in most Parisian ateliers, was characteristic of Carolus-Duran’s influence, and looking back further, Velázquez. During a trip to Capri, Sargent was introduced to a lithe young model named Rosina Ferrara, who yielded several portraits and studies of the figure in the landscape. In one painting, Sargent placed her dancing on a rooftop, a presentiment of the Spanish paintings that led to El Jaleo (not in the show). In Morocco, he made beautiful sketches of architecture, long shadows creeping across arched doorways. From there to Venice, where he painted the finest souvenirs of his youthful travels, young men and women flirting (Venetian Street and The Sulphur Match, described in the catalogue as “edgily modern.” Sargent was edgily modern the same way Michael Bublé is grunge) or strolling at their leisure (A Venetian Interior). The figures all but melt into dimly lit surroundings, muted stone walls and floors suddenly enlivened by thin shafts of sunlight. Barely in his late twenties, Sargent was following the recommended path for a young talent, traveling across the Mediterranean in search of paintable material. I don’t doubt that the people and places fascinated him, though everything is slicked up and romanticized with an eye to exhibiting back in Paris.

There is overlap, as one might expect from a young, ambitious artist. Even before he was hunting genre pieces in Italy, Sargent’s portrait career was underway in France. The work is accomplished, the brushwork facile if not yet showy, and except for an occasional compositional experiment (Marie Buloz Pailleron), conservative enough not to alarm his clients. The large portrait of the Pailleron children shows acuity in the revelation of his sitters’s personalities—throughout his career, Sargent was especially sympathetic to children—but the handling is Velázquez through a vaseline-smeared lens. A year later, he painted the Mephistophelean image of a dashing gynecologist, Dr. Pozzi at Home, in what John Updike called “a cozy crimson aura of satanic drag.” The floodgates opened to his grand manner portraits, some very good, others forgettable. Some of this was, to be less than charitable, the fault of the sitters (Once faced with an uninspiring subject, Cecelia Beaux put it bluntly: “….if you’ve ever seen her, you’ve seen her like scattered over the earth in dozens”). They couldn’t all be flamboyant, though Sargent strained to endow each of his sitters with the requisite glamor. Between full-scale commissions, he could lean back on informal oil studies, like those of Rodin and Albert de Belleroche, the latter of whom also sat for a profile drawing in which he looks like Mme. Gautreau’s doppelgänger. 

Amid this torrent of alternating commissions and intimacies, Sargent committed an unabashed masterpiece and one of the greatest group portraits of the nineteenth century. Unlike Degas’s Bellelli family or Eakins’s tribute to Dr. Gross, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit appears to have been conceived and painted without undue preparation, as if, standing in the foyer of a friend’s apartment, Sargent knocked it out in a week or two. Like Degas’s familial study, it implies psychological layers that went clear over the heads of contemporary viewers—Henry James saw a “happy play-world … of charming children.” Three sisters dressed in starched pinafores stand at irregular intervals, one facing away from us in a shadowed alcove. The fourth and youngest child sits on a rug, holding a doll. In The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, Sargent created a space charged with childhood mystery. He would rarely, if ever, invest an interior with that much significance again. 

Placed near the back end of the exhibition is an intermezzo, a group of formal portraits of Parisian women by Sargent’s contemporaries. If the idea is to offer comparison or context to Madame X, her stylized elegance is uncontested. But the best of them, as painted by Whistler, Manet, and Renoir, give a fuller, if less sleekly realized, accounting of their subjects.

After the controversy of Madame X passed, Sargent never again tested the resilience of portrait conventions. There was a fortune to be made, as long as his sitters were properly flattered. In the bargain, they enjoyed the assurance of posing for the most gifted portrait painter of his, and several other generations. There was more than a passing chance that their likenesses would one day end up in museums. At the least, their social status was consecrated.

Later, after he’d made his mint, Sargent chafed at his lot as a portrait painter. I take him at his word when he says he abhors the job. But he gets no sympathy—he followed the blueprint of his ambitions. His contemporaries understood this. In a 1910 essay titled “Sargentolatry,” Walter Sickert wrote, “the work of the modern fashionable portrait-painter has to be considered as, in a sense, a collaboration, a compromise between what the painter would like to do, and what his employer will put up with.” Sargent compensated through facility. If he compromised autonomy in order to please the subject, he could at least put on a show of his dexterity. Facility is the most recognizable of his assets, and it comes with its own complications. Camille Pissarro’s critique was succinct: “he is not an enthusiast but rather an adroit performer.” Updike titled a review of the 1986 Whitney retrospective that jump-started Sargent’s reputation, “Something Missing,” and his conclusion echoed Pissarro. “Where no warming familiarity exists,” he wrote, “a certain distancing finesse takes over.” 

Updike thought the Whitney show wouldn’t alter Sargent’s standing. In fact, it introduced a sea change in the way Sargent was interpreted and a new determination to link him to the avant-garde (Soon after the 1986 show, I overheard a Whitney docent telling her audience that Andy Warhol was the Sargent of his time. The push was well under way). Art historians began to reappraise Sargent’s brushwork, in all its lubricious flourish, as a precursor to Abstract Expressionism.

The reevaluation has less to do with art than with the culture at large. An artist’s popularity doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and Sargent’s resurgence parallels deeper trends. What troubles me is the conflation of art and money, the preoccupation with veneers, and how this all trickles down to the studios, to artists and students who envy his skill and success. Technique is generally prioritized in schools, and the fascination with Sargent’s is emblematic of a fascination with surfaces, painterly and otherwise. What was Mme. Gautreau, both as a striving arriviste and in her painted portrait, but a performance designed to attract attention? When Sargent sold the painting to the Met, he volunteered that it was probably the best thing he’d ever done. As a stripped-down expression of social ambition, it was. 

On my way out, I bid adieu to Young Lady in 1866. She, too, is an artifice, albeit closer to the realist ethos. Well, all portraits are constructed on artifice. They may tell us something about the sitter, and they surely disclose something about the artist. In our response to them, we reveal ourselves as well. 

Sargent and Paris is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 3, 2025.

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On the last day of May, I visited the city and took in a few museum shows, not all of which included Sargent. That needs to be said, because it seemed like every day I taught last month, someone urged me to go to the Met to pay homage to the nineteenth century’s most exalted prestidigitator of portraiture. But I like the road less traveled, and a colleague brought another exhibition to my attention, featuring Rembrandt in a limited role, at the Jewish Museum. As it happens, there are two shows there right now that are very much worth seeing. 

On the first floor is Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and adapted by the Jewish Museum. Both exhibitions were curated by Dr. Laura Katzman, Professor of Art History at James Madison University; the New York exhibition was realized in collaboration with Dr. Stephen Brown, Curator at the Jewish Museum. It is an overdue retrospective that doubles as a timely sociopolitical critique. 

Shahn’s credentials for the role of liberal social commentator were impeccable. He was born in Lithuania in 1898 to Orthodox Jewish parents. His father was exiled to Siberia as a suspected revolutionary before escaping to the United States. The family reunited and settled in Brooklyn, and Shahn trained as a lithographer. He attended NYU, City College, and the National Academy of Design, and studied anatomy with George Bridgman at the Art Students League of New York in 1916-17. Shahn returned to the League years later to sharpen his skills as a fresco painter—among other skills, Shahn would become one of this country’s great muralists. 

Two trips through Europe in the 1920s fostered an interest in modern art, but the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe inspired a change of direction, dramatically announced in a series of paintings titled The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–32). “Ever since I could remember,” Shahn said later, “l’d wished that l’d been lucky enough to be alive at a great time-when something big was going on, like the Crucifixion. And suddenly realized I was! Here I was living through another crucifixion. Here was something to paint!”

The exhibition opens with the series’s centerpiece, one of this country’s great protest paintings. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants executed for murdering two people in an armed robbery, are shown in their open coffins. Standing over them and holding lilies in mock tribute are the then-presidents of Harvard and MIT and a probate judge, the three of whom were appointed to determine whether Sacco and Vanzetti had received a fair trial. The case generated tremendous interest here and abroad—H. G. Wells called it “a case like the Dreyfus case, by which the soul of a people is tested and displayed.” The defendants were political anarchists whose guilt is still contested. Shahn’s deadpan depiction of judicial arbiters, expressionless in formal dress, juxtaposed with the lifeless faces of Sacco and Vanzetti, evokes the suspicion that the violation of the pair’s civil liberties was a foregone conclusion. The nominally three-dimensional figures and fractured perspective are evidence that Shahn retained features of Modernist art while adopting a figurative expression. 

The pictorial tension of stylized figuration would animate Shahn’s socially conscious images for nearly forty years. Figures symbolic of everyman might dominate the picture plane, as in the standing job seekers of Unemployed (ca. 1938) or the brooding man behind barbed wire in 1943 AD (ca. 1943), or appear small amid their circumstances, like the children “playing” in post-war Liberation (1945) or Handball (1939), a relative anomaly in that it avoids obvious commentary, the immense wall providing a blank slate upon which the viewer may inscribe meaning. Handball, like many of Shahn’s paintings, was based on his own black-and-white photography. In the 1930s he was employed as a photographer by the Resettlement Administration-Farm Security Administration and traveled the Deep South along with Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. The photographs, amply represented here, were far more than a reference for future paintings. They hold their own alongside Evans’s and Lange’s photographs, adding a humane documentary aspect to Shahn’s creative output. 

The political landscape Shahn covered is too familiar. A watercolor and ink depiction of Father Charles Coughlin depicts the priest spewing bile in a Hitlerian pose—the photo I took shows exhibition lights reflected in the picture glass, tiny white dots strung like airborne spittle from Coughlin’s open mouth. Coughlin’s antisemitism and support of Nazi policies were immensely popular with radio listeners in the 1930s. The screen print Vandenberg, Dewey, and Taft (1941) and a 1948 lithograph of Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey show politicians as smilingly duplicitous characters, reminders that distrust of elected officials is a venerable tradition. In Integration, Supreme Court (1963), the nine white justices are seated at the bottom of the painting, dwarfed by a cavernous space and classical columns, disconnected from the real-world impact of their decisions.

Although Shahn’s reputation rests upon his response to social injustices—war, corruption, civil rights and the working man were recurrent themes—he sometimes exercised a more whimsical strain in work from the 1950s onward, as in Everyman, with its harlequins reminiscent of Cézanne and Picasso. An association with Diego Rivera in the 1930s gives context to his mural work and shared politics, but polemics never displace Shahn’s natural lyricism. Shahn’s art gives way neither to idealism nor disillusionment. He responds to the issues without succumbing to their oppressive weight. 

Immersed in religious studies as a child, Shahn became, in the words of his wife and fellow artist Bernarda Bryson Shahn, “pagan in spirit.” Nonetheless, he engaged with Jewish themes throughout his career, with increasing interest in spiritual subjects late in life. Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity closes with the artist’s interpretations of text from the Hebrew Bible, painted in Hebraic script. They are predictably iconoclastic. In the end, Shahn explained, he was “more of an anarchist, more of a perpetual radical than a visionary utopian.”

One flight up, The Hebrew Bible is central to The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt, an exhibition of fine and decorative arts that illuminates the story of Esther, whose heroism on behalf of Persian Jews is commemorated by the holiday of Purim. Esther, taken by King Ahasuerus as his wife, pleaded successfully for the lives of her fellow Jews, thus saving them from a genocidal plot by a royal advisor. According to Abigail Rapoport, Curator of Judaica at the Jewish Museum, and Michele Frederick, Curator of European Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art, the story’s symbolism appealed not only to Amsterdam’s Jewish population, who enjoyed religious freedom after fleeing the Inquisition and pogroms elsewhere in Europe, but to the Dutch in general, who celebrated their recent independence from Spain. 

Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter, and his humane portrayal of his neighbors has generated conjecture about his sympathies. In the nineteenth century, a story was floated that Rembrandt had converted to Judaism—a modern counter-theory is that his Calvinist upbringing would have instilled the belief of Christian superiority. Whether one subscribes to a philosemitic or antisemitic reading of Rembrandt’s personality, his respect for his subjects was more than an opportunity to paint luxurious fabrics and exotic faces, to partake in cultural “slumming.” That much is obvious in paintings like The Jewish Bride and Portrait of an Old Jew (neither in show), and to a lesser extent, the exhibition’s centerpiece, A Jewish Heroine from the Hebrew Bible. It is a fairly early Rembrandt, beautifully rendered with an emphasis on opulent dress, as would have been expected by patrons, though with less emotional depth than in his later work.

For the purposes of the exhibition, there are two problems with A Jewish Heroine from the Hebrew Bible. It’s a good Rembrandt, not a great one. The second issue, as has been noted by Rebecca Schiffman in Hyperallergic, is that the identification of the painting’s subject as Esther is inconclusive. The exhibition’s wall note admits as much, and given the presence of a maidservant at her toilette, I see her as a tentative first essay on Bathsheba, a subject Rembrandt would nail twenty years later. A similar uncertainty clings to Rembrandt’s majestic etchings of The Great Jewish Bride, thought to be modeled by his wife Saskia. Each of these works share the parenthetical description, “probably Esther.” In the same vein, I harbor misgivings about the excellent Esther and Mordecai by Rembrandt’s student, Aert de Gelder. Although so titled at least since the painting was acquired by the Rhode Island School of Design in 1917, it was previously attributed to Ferdinand Bol—another Rembrandt student—and known as The Misers. The gray-haired woman, seen in profile wearing a veil and ornate dress, is too old to represent the presumably youthful Esther. Indeed, de Gelder’s other known paintings of Esther and Mordecai together show her as a much younger woman. 

Attributions and titles are fluid matters, subject to evolving scholarship and the caprices of taste. Rembrandt and His Wife, Saskia, now attributed to Bol, was once unaccountably ascribed to Rembrandt. The portrait of Saskia aligns closely with Rembrandt’s later painting of a woman trying on earrings, now in Russia. But its connection to Esther is beyond tenuous. Nor do the etched studies of a turbaned man, the first by Jan Lievens and the second, a free copy by Rembrandt, relate directly to the theme of the exhibition. They offer an interesting sidebar on the friendship and rivalry between the two artists that began when they were precocious teenagers apprenticed to the same master in Leiden. There’s a large Feast of Esther by Lievens, the figures compressed into a tight space and dramatically lit in the Caravaggisti manner. It’s a flawed piece, yet admirable—Lievens was eighteen when he painted it, and his unconventional paint handling may have influenced the slightly older Rembrandt (a wall note erroneously claims Lievens was the elder of the two), or a course the two young artists arrived upon in unison. 

Even in an Amsterdam that admired her, Esther doesn’t appear to have been a particularly compelling visual subject, as were heroines like Bathsheba or Judith, who could provide the dramatic goods of coerced adultery and murder. The best paintings of Esther were by Tintoretto and Artemisia Gentileschi—in both, fearing for her life, she falls into a dead faint before Ahasuerus. The episode was not part of the Hebrew Bible’s account and was added in Greek texts. Did Dutch painters avoid this scene because they were unfamiliar with the Greek version, or because it emphasized Esther’s vulnerability? 

Though reading “probably Esther” in wall notes doesn’t help matters, one need not be discouraged by the asterisks. The subtext of The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt is a reunion of Rembrandt and his contemporaries. Plus, there are other compelling reasons to visit. Until very recently, neither an exhibition devoted to the erosion of civil liberties nor one about a Biblical heroine would have been especially controversial. Now, amid outside efforts to dictate visual content and whitewash history, such installations practically constitute acts of valor. As Ben Shahn said in 1952, “It is not the survival of art alone that is at issue, but the survival of the free individual and a civilized society.” 

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity is on view through October 12, 2025, and The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt is on view through August 10, 2025; both exhibitions are presented at the Jewish Museum.

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At what age did you decide to become an artist?
Some of my earliest memories involve sitting in a high chair with a cartoon activity book, drawing characters, and solving visual puzzles. At the age of five, I asked for a professional drawing pad for my birthday, and subsequently, had an art fair on our front lawn. I don’t believe there were any sales. But it was at the age of eight that I asked for a Jon Gnagy Learn to Draw Set for Christmas, as I had seen his program on TV. For days I did nothing but plow through the lessons. By the end of the holiday break, I announced to the world that I was going to be an artist.

How did your parents react when you told them you wanted to be an artist?
They were quite supportive, but my father invoked a phrase many a young artist has heard: “You’re going to need something to fall back on.” I promised him that I would and spent my first year of art school studying graphic design, a field with which I was familiar, having checked out my share of books on the subject from childhood on while perusing the art stacks at the local library. I felt I learned enough about design from that single year and that I needed to spend the rest of my education studying painting, so I came out to Philadelphia to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Who are your favorite artists?
I admire the work of so many artists that even a short list would be difficult to compile. My late teacher, Sidney Goodman, changed my perception of what contemporary figurative painting could be. Among living painters, it’s Antonio Lopez Garcia, hands down. I think my fellow PAFA alumnus, Vincent Desiderio, is brilliant, as is his teaching cohort, Bernardo Siciliano. Catherine Murphy’s paintings are poetry. Beyond them, Jenny Saville, Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, Fairfield Porter, Lennart Anderson, Edwin Dickinson, Balthus, Degas, Abbott Handerson Thayer. I’ve always felt a special kinship with Edward Hopper. Norman Rockwell was my first hero, and I still love and respect him. Andrew Wyeth was my principal early influence, and a dangerous one, as my work greatly resembled his for some time. I would meet him at nineteen and spend a day at the studio and compound with some fellow students, where we would see some of the infamous Helga paintings, ten years before the public would. (He told us his wife hadn’t even seen them yet.) His best advice to me that day was not to try to be him. Years later, a painting I posed for would hang on a wall in his home.

Who is your favorite artist whose work is unlike your own?
I developed a fondness for Robert Rauschenberg in my childhood, but I believe I was drawn to the figurative imagery he employed alongside abstract expressionism. He was having his cake and eating it, too. I love William Kentridge. Few people in recent history have created work in such a variety of media, with critical social and political messages attached. Yet, he’s not afraid to display a sense of humor. Anselm Kiefer. Willem de Kooning. Jennifer Bartlett. There are so many I could name, spanning a wide variety of styles. And as a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner grant, I have a soft spot for both of them.

Art book you cannot live without?
I actually read Ralph Mayer’s Materials and Techniques for the Artist cover to cover in my youth. Peck’s Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist was invaluable. Then there are the first two pocket books on artists that my mother purchased at the Art Institute of Chicago, thus beginning my art library, which I’ll always treasure.

What is the quality you most admire in an artist?
The human quality I admire most is humility, which is sometimes lacking in this art world. The formal quality I most appreciate in an artist is the ability to grow and change, rather than churn out the same work year after year, tempting as it may be.

Do you keep a sketchbook?
Yes. Besides a couple of newer ones I use, I often grab sketchbooks that go back as far as my art school days, which have some blank pages. Looking through them, I’m transported across a vast span of my life. Nearly all the drawings within them were done in the field, be they two-minute sketches or hours-long studies, every one conjures recollections of those days and places and people that photography never could.

What’s your favorite museum in the world?
While I have only seen a fraction of the museums I would like to visit, there’s no question that the Met is one of the greatest museums in the world. I feel fortunate to have lived in New York for the last twelve years, in that I can visit it often. A close second would be Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, dedicated as it is to the moment that painting began to change radically. It also holds a place in my heart, as I was in that museum when I decided, at the age of thirty, to leave graphic design and paint full-time.

What’s the best exhibition you have ever attended?
Choosing a best exhibition is a challenge, but seeing the Sidney Goodman retrospective at the Pennsylvania State University Museum of Art at the age of twenty-three changed my goals as a painter. As a nineteen-year-old, then worshipping Andrew Wyeth, the Met retrospective exposed me to originals I had been examining only in books for over a decade. Perhaps the most interesting show I’ve ever seen was Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible at the Met Breuer. To see the working processes of so many artists, usually buried under successive layers of paint, was a rare treat.

If you were not an artist, what would you be?
I’ve been a lifelong musician and currently run the Brooklyn Jam Collective, so I may have gone in that direction were it not for painting. I briefly considered pursuing a career in music in my youth, but I couldn’t envision a world where aging guitarists were still playing. Little did I know. In the end, I knew I was a better painter than musician. The profession I’ve admired most is that of the writer, in every flavor. Beautifully crafting thoughts into delectable sentences, woven into even a short article, much less a thick tome, is a poetic skill as much as it is a powerful weapon.

Did you have an artistic cohort that influenced your early creative development?
As a child in a small city, I had no artistic cohorts my own age. My adult library card, awarded to me at the age of eight (rather than the usual twelve), allowed me to bring home as many books as I could carry, and they would be my earliest art education. By thirteen or so, I was taking adult classes at our local art center and would get close to their faculty, composed of talented painters who were commercial artists by day and fine artists by night.

What is one thing you didn’t learn in art school that you wish you had?
Many artists answer this question the same way: that they wish they had learned more about the business side of the art world. About what awaits them in the wilds of the gallery system, and how to discuss their work. How to promote it. At PAFA, both faculty and fellow students would admonish you if you even hinted at a concern about making a living after art school. To discuss it was verboten, blasphemy. There was a great deal of magical thinking going on, believing that the universe would simply provide.

What work of art have you looked at most and why?
Nighthawks is indelibly etched into my retinas. Perhaps because, like the Mona Lisa, we see it everywhere. But for me, it’s not just about Hopper, nor all of the formal and psychological analysis that this masterpiece has wrought. For me, it’s a painting that says New York, with more than a touch of noir, at a very specific time in its history. My childhood dream was to live here, and seeing it for the first time at ten or eleven years old, it immediately became the iconographic symbol of this city for me.

What is your secret visual pleasure outside of art?
Looking at every moment of every day with a painter’s eye, and if I’m with someone, sharing an especially striking visual, interrupting any conversation to point it out. A trait that’s not always appreciated. Yet teaching others to see, to look harder, whether in the course of teaching or simply among my circle of friends and family, is one of my greatest pleasures.

Do you listen to music in your studio?
I listen to a wide variety of music while I work. I also listen to podcasts, artist and author lectures on YouTube, old movies, stand-up comedy, or if I need an especially energizing boost, episodes of 30 Rock. But often I’ll work in silence, mixed with the sounds of my usually quiet street in Brooklyn.

What is the last gallery you visited?
Equity Gallery for the last days of Melanie Vote’s fantastic show. I’d admired her work going back many years before I met her, and she’s only getting better. If there’s a painter in my acquaintance who deserves blue chip gallery representation, it’s her.

Who is an underrated artist that people should be looking at?
I never miss an opportunity to make people aware of Sidney Goodman. Though he was collected by every major museum and showed in important exhibitions in his lifetime, he never achieved great fame, having eschewed the New York art scene, preferring his native Philadelphia, where he would spend his life teaching and influencing a generation of painters. He’s a bit dark for many, as is another painter I love, who has spent his career somewhat under appreciated, Jerome Witkin. Subject matter aside, I find them both to be expressive and painterly painters and master draftsmen. Going back a century or so, I feel that Abbott Handerson Thayer has never received his due. He could handle paint better than Sargent. And many of the artists in these interviews reply “themselves.” Humility aside, I’d be remiss not to echo that sentiment.

What art materials can you not live without?
Besides the obvious paint, brushes, and surface upon which to use them, I am always on the hunt for good watercolor paper, which is becoming more and more scarce. As a painter who works a great deal in that medium, there is no item more critical.

Do you paint/sculpt/create art every day?
I try, but far too many days find me at least partially engaged in other activities that may preclude me from doing so. But even if it’s a small amount of time, I do my best to do something daily.

What is the longest time you went without creating art?
The year I turned forty, I was diagnosed with cancer and didn’t have health insurance. I bought a computer and reluctantly returned to graphic design, a field I had left ten years prior. While I occasionally drew, I wouldn’t pick up a brush for four years. Yet I did do a great deal of non-commercial work in Photoshop during that period, exploring that medium as a painter might. Eventually, a commission from a long-time client allowed me to return to painting, which I’ve consistently done since.

What do you do when you are feeling uninspired?
The word “inspiration” has different meanings for people. To me, it’s a brief spark that occurs when an idea comes to me, or suddenly seeing something that makes me have to paint it. But once I choose to follow that initial inspiration, it becomes a job I need to complete. I have a quote on my wall by Howard Pyle: “Young people, don’t get the idea that you have an artistic temperament which must be humored. Don’t believe you cannot do good work unless you feel in the mood for it. That is all nonsense. I frequently have to force myself to make a start in the morning; but after a short while I find I can work. Only hard and regular work will bring success.”

What are the questions that drive your work?
What are we doing here? I remember as a very young child often having deeply existential moments of dissociation from myself. Observing my surroundings but not being of them, wondering if this reality with which I’d been presented was only a dream. A friend recently compared my work to dreams, which I’d never heard, but appreciated.

What is the most essential quality in an artist?
Perseverance. Faith. Self-confidence. All of which can be ever challenging in this field.

What is something you haven’t yet achieved in art?
Showing more. I’ve been a bit under the radar for too long for a variety of reasons. I also want to spread the word that watercolor can be a medium every bit as serious as oil. While I’m equally proud of my work in all media, in which I work, I’ve always been primarily known for my watercolors. Upon seeing them, people often exclaim that they can’t be watercolor. Hearing that makes me feel that I’m doing something unique.

What is the best thing about art in the era of social media?
For some artists, it has brought success, sales, and established reputations. While I have not managed to achieve that via social media, I do treasure the virtual and real world friendships I’ve made with other artists and the exposure to hundreds of others whom the legacy art media never would have shown me in another era.

PATRICK KING (@patrickking123 | patrickking.org) will be teaching “Plein Air Watercolor in Central Park,” a two-day workshop on June 28 and 29, 2025.

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