National Academy Museum

See It Loud

Peter Heinemann died two years ago now. He was my first drawing teacher at SVA. He taught  the importance of drawing. He held very strong opinions which kept him in a time frame or mental state never quite of this contemporary world. He stayed very close to what he learned himself. He went to Black Mountain where he studied with Joseph Albers. The geometric patterns owe to Albers and a want to feel contemporary. 

Peter was very romantic in his drawing. He drew and erased. The rhythm for the sake of rhythm abstractly was what comes to mind. He was formal in this way. He etched a final line somehow which has a very psychological compelling nature. I always felt his emotion was unbound by form. Character is a hard thing. Some bring to the painting, others believe the form delivers it.

I met Paul Georges at the SVA workshops which Peter presided over. Paul believed the drawing was a language that could be used to make a reality "as if". He talked a lot about suspending ones disbelief. Also of being unselfconscious.

At this viewing I saw he seemed to have a conflict between Value and Color. He was intellectually on the side of the Modernist surface but had a foot in the Old Master value camp. Building up a surface from the burt sienna ground, though he started with ink and white canvas on most paintings.

Maybe this back and forth never allowed him to be in a new world.

He later tried to paint on Red grounds which immediately set him in a modernist relation to color but then his drawing whittles back into space once again.

He liked how traditional artists put space into a flat shape.

He knew so much about all this he couldn't help using it all.

This painting below has the set up of a Titian painting which he would talk about for hours.

There is a wonderful complexity here in the drawing. Paul drew all his life and it is probably his legacy  though sadly drawing is distant, it allowed him this poetry and his humanity.

Resika in the old days was more of an uptown painter. His paintings retain that demeanor to this day. He studied with Hofmann as did Georges but stayed within that parameter. Wolf Kahn is not in this show but would be interesting with Resika.

Also a glaring omission is no women painters. I prefer Louisa Matthaisdottir to her husband Leland Bell. Jane Freilecher certainly also should be here.