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Esteban Vicente’s Collages: On Display and In Discussion

Concrete Improvisations, Grey Art Gallery

The collage works of Esteban Vicente, the only Spanish-born member of New York’s Abstract Expressionists, take center stage at a current exhibition at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and were the focus of an accompanying talk by Daniel Haxall held last week at the Institute of Fine Arts. Teaching at NYU and the New York Studio School, among other colleges and universities, and renting a studio on East Tenth Street, Vicente was a major player in the downtown art scene. On view at the Grey through March 26, Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente literally and physically reinserts Vicente’s works into this scene. Curated by Lynn Gumpert, Edward J. Sullivan, and Ana Martínez de Aguilar, the exhibition and its programming are bringing deserved recognition to an influential artist. The curatorial team reintroduces Vicente to New York audiences through his collages and small-scale sculptures, and takes great care to communicate Vicente’s involvement in the development of Abstract Expressionism.

Born in 1903 in Turégano, Spain, Vicente received traditional academic training in sculpture before turning to painting. During the Spanish Civil War, he emigrated to New York, where he first exhibited paintings at the Kleemann Gallery in 1937. The story on display at the Grey, however, picks up in 1949, when Vicente turned to collage while teaching at UC-Berkeley. Organized chronologically, the Grey exhibition allows Vicente’s developments in collage to unfurl, placing a heavy visual and didactic emphasis on his process.

The first half of the exhibition tells two interweaving stories: of Vicente’s collage-making process and of his specific contributions to Abstract Expressionism. As part of the first narrative, the Grey curators allow the artist to explain his own process. A filmstrip produced in 1964 runs on loop, showing images of Vicente working in his studio with an accompanying soundtrack of the artist speaking. Approaching the act of collage as a painter, Vicente described his collages as “paintings with paper.” Though some of his early collages use found papers, such as labels and newspaper clippings, they are primarily composed of pieces of Vicente’s own hand-painted paper. The pasted papers therefore function as painted gestures and have garnered the label of “action collage,” which situates these works squarely within Abstract Expressionism. The finished collages are not as spontaneous as they might initially appear. Using pins to temporarily hold the cut and torn pieces of paper, Vicente moved and readjusted the pieces, allowing the colors and shapes to interact, before finally pasting them down. He regularly took about a month to create each collage. Vicente’s idiosyncratic process results in his distinct, painterly collages. The large scale of his collages also recalls painting more so than the typically intimate scale of collage works. In fact, the smaller collages exhibited were made by Vicente as gifts, such as a 1959 collage for Dore Ashton, a personal act necessitating the work’s smaller scale. While up close, the textures and shadows of layered, pasted papers create depth and tension that draw you in closer, from afar Vicente’s works can be read as paintings.

Following the second narrative, Vicente’s earliest collages feature small, densely packed pieces of paper, which evoke a sense of spontaneity enhanced by quick charcoal marks. With wall texts invoking ties to Willem de Kooning and Hans Hoffmann, and describing Vicente’s early collages as having a “decentralized, all-over composition,” the Grey exhibition underscores Vicente’s ties to Abstract Expressionism. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the papers in Vicente’s collages grow in scale, become more colorful, and are chosen more sparingly. The simplification of form and color animates the composition, calling greater attention to the interaction of color, texture, and surface that overloads earlier experiments.

This sensation is manifested in an even greater sense in the second half of the exhibition. Here the heavy emphases on Vicente’s process and his Abstract Expressionist/New York presence established in the first half dissipate, and the works are allowed to speak on their own. After a small collage of dense squares titled Manhattan from 1973, we travel with Vicente to Hawaii and the Hamptons, and our sight is met with organic shapes and bright, exuberant colors. A series of collages made during a residency at the Honolulu Academy of Arts almost doubles in size, and each work pulls the viewer in through spiraling forms and tropical colors that recall Vicente’s natural surroundings. The final room again shifts in color palette and returns to more geometric shapes, showing yet another shift in Vicente’s work. The transformations visible throughout the exhibition suggest that Vicente was always revising his overall production, in the same way that he reconfigured individual collages.

The divertimientos – or toys – exhibited account for the sculpture portion of the show. All created between 1968 and 1997, these objects break with the general chronology established by the collages, as they are displayed throughout the gallery in four vitrines. Small-scale works made mostly out of individual pieces of painted wood or cardboard assembled together in playful arrangements, these too are left to speak for themselves, and it is easy to read the toys as in dialogue with the collage creations.

About midway through the exhibition, next to the 1962 collage Black and Red, a small wall text addresses Vicente’s Spanish heritage and situates his tactile works in a history of Spanish realism and collage. Daniel Haxall, Assistant Professor at Kutztown University and contributor to the Concrete Improvisations catalogue, chose this point as the focus for his talk last Thursday, part of the IFA’s Colloquium on Spanish and Latin American Art and Visual Culture. Haxall positioned Vicente’s work within a general history of collage and its Spanish heritage in his lecture, “Esteban Vicente, Abstract Expressionism, and the Spanish Legacy of Collage.” Haxall began his talk by introducing the feud between Vicente and Robert Motherwell, which was sparked by Vicente’s 1963 letter to ARTnews criticizing Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic. In beginning with this piece of dramatic, art world gossip, Haxall paralleled the Grey’s exhibition by immediately putting Vicente into direct conversation with his New York peers. Reintroducing this conflicted relationship in the second half of the talk, Haxall used the contrast between the two men to emphasize the “Spanishness” of Vicente’s character and collage, as compared to the American Motherwell and his French-inflected collage. Haxall made this latter point by placing a heavy emphasis on Motherwell’s admiration for Mallarmé. Haxall brought the talk full circle by extending the feud to address the debate over who created the “action collage:” Motherwell or Vicente? Such questions of national identity and ownership occurred squarely within the Abstract Expressionist scene and relate directly to the distinct processes of the two artists, tying back to the main themes under consideration at the Grey.

Haxall gave his presentation to a completely full house in the Loeb Room at the IFA’s Duke House. A Q&A session following the talk provided all audience members the opportunity to engage directly with the speaker. Two main points of discussion and debate recurred: the merits of framing Vicente’s work in terms of its “Spanishness” and Vicente’s current lack of recognition in New York. Audience members were wary of overemphasizing a national legacy in Vicente’s collage, particularly as he was so entrenched in the New York scene. Indeed, many works on display at the Grey, such as those made in Hawaii, show a stronger reflection of Vicente’s immediate surroundings than of his Spanish past. It was suggested that his exaggerated “Spanishness” was a discursive strategy constructed by Vicente himself – one that only functioned within the New York scene, as Vicente refused to connect himself with contemporary Spanish artists. Haxall responded by again emphasizing the comparison of Vicente to Motherwell, whom he views as provoking a nationalistic defensiveness in Vicente. In short, Haxall described Vicente as an “American artist, but culturally Spanish.”

Vicente’s perceived under-representation in New York institutions was also a heated topic of conversation, particularly in regards to MoMA’s current Abstract Expressionist New York show. In addition to the many works on loan from private collections and Spanish institutions, the Grey exhibition does have Vicente works on loan from MoMA and the Whitney, and the Met owns a number of Vicente’s collages as well, signaling a continued New York presence. It was noted in discussion that MoMA curator Ann Temkin tried to include a Vicente collage in the Abstract Expressionist New York exhibition, but ultimately felt that the particular piece did not fit and was not representative of Vicente’s stronger works. Haxall suggested two explanations for Vicente’s current lack of recognition. First, the artist was never interested in self-promotion. Second, Haxall pointed to the residue of critical bias against collage in promoting Abstract Expressionism – or, the “Triumph of American Painting.”

Organized discussion could have easily continued, as audience members held strong opinions on both sides of these issues, and conversation surely did resume informally over wine and tapas following the reception. However, one resounding fact remains clear: Concrete Improvisations at the Grey provides the unique opportunity to see a large number of Vicente’s collages together and in the physical context of the artist’s own downtown New York. As you walk through Vicente’s experiments and developments in collage, you can evaluate these issues for yourself – or simply enjoy the works at hand.

Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente is on view at the Grey Art Gallery until March 26, 2011. For more information, visit www.nyu.edu/greyart.

For more information on the IFA’s Colloquium on Spanish and Latin American Art and Visual Culture, please visit http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/academics/slac.htm.

Esteban Vicente: Portrait of an Artist, an exhibition of Vicente’s paintings, is also currently on view until April 10 at the Parrish Art Museum.

Rae Kaplan is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts.

One Comment

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