EMERSONWOELFFER

On the cover detail from:

UNTITLED , 1954-55Oil and collage on canvas, 68 x 104 inches

EXTENDED THROUGH FEBRUARY 14, 2015

SELECTIONS FROM A CAREER

MANNY SILVERMAN GALLERY

EMERSONWOELFFER

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

FIGURE, 1950. Oil on canvas, 20 1/4 x 16 1/4 inches

hen Emerson Woelffer came to Los Angeles in 1959, he had experienced anexemplary artist’s life. He was friends with Robert Motherwell andBuckminster Fuller, was a collector of vintage cars and tribal art. He hadplayed drums in a Chicago jazz combo and was friendly with musicians, had

lived in Mexico and Europe, most recently on an island in the Bay of Naples. His work hadbeen the subject of several significant solo exhibitions. He was 45 when he began teachingpainting at Chouinard Art Institute and his lively personal history made a significant impressionon students including Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode and Larry Bell.

From the students point of view, he was a practicing artist who happened to be teaching,something of a rarity in those days in Los Angeles. Woelffer explained, “Teaching was thebest way to be a painter because you only had to do it two or three days a week. When Ileft school each day, I went into myself. I couldn’t merge the two together.” (1)

His method of teaching however was not divorced from his way of thinking about art.Ruscha put it best after curating an important survey of Woelffer’s art shortly after the artistpassed away in 2003. He recalled that Woelffer taught him and others that “art was simplya thing to be practiced rather than studied. Paint a picture rather than study about thepainting of a picture….He could get you to dive into the pool without ever using the worddive or the word pool or the words into the.” (2) That may have been a uniquely Ruschaeanmethod of describing the practice but it jibed well with Woelffer’s faith in the practice ofhis art. He took pains to allow the art to manifest itself as though directed from a highersource. Further, as an informed admirer and collector of tribal art, he found support for hisconviction that art could be driven by spiritual beliefs. “I don’t do those images in my painting,but maybe the attitude might be similar, a kind of belief. I think my stuff is very spiritual.Some people can put spirituality into words. I do it with a stick of wood with pig hair on theend and some paint.” (3)

His obsession with tribal art began as a child at the Field Museum in Chicago, where he wasborn in 1914, named after none other than that most American of philosophers, Ralph WaldoEmerson. His father was involved in real estate and insurance but his mother took him toart classes at the Chicago Art Institute School, where he was enrolled from 1935 to 1937. Hesupported himself by working as a janitor part-time but his training in figurative art paid off.He was able to secure a position doing easel paintings for the Works ProgressAdministration for $90 a month plus supplies. Yet, he also worked part time installing exhi-bitions for the modern art dealer Katherine Kuh. It was there that he was exposed to the

WEMERSON WOELFFER: TRUE BELIEVERHunter Drohojowska-Philp

work of Spanish Surrealist Joan Miró. “I don’t know why, but it meant something to me.Sometimes, when you know the answers it kills something.” (4) He investigated the work ofWassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, working towards an abstraction and ultimately declaringhimself bored by the practice of figurative art.

His training as a visual artist contributed to his placement as a topographical draftsman forthe U.S. Army Air Force for a year during World War II. (5) In 1942, after he left the service,Woelffer contacted László Moholy Nagy, director of the New Bauhaus at the Institute ofDesign (I.D.) in Chicago. For $18 a week, he was given a teaching position that rotatedthrough painting, photography, design and sculpture — all accomplishments of Moholy Nagy.(They even shared a studio). Woelffer’s early abstract work from these years was indebtedto Constructivist ideals and he never lost his grounding in an ordered and balanced abstractionthough he moved away from rigidity or predictability in composition. This was due in part tomeeting Roberto Matta when the Chilean painter gave a talk at the school in 1943. Woelfferabsorbed the Surrealist’s excitement over Automatism, letting the unconscious guide theexecution of forms without the limitations of reason or aesthetics. He felt the impulse to besimilar to the improvisational techniques used playing jazz, which he continued to play duringparties at his studio on Sundays. It was there that he met a young photographer named Diana(Dina) Anderson McLean, a student of Harry Callahan, who was teaching at the I.D. Theymarried in 1946.

For the next few years, Woelffer’s abstract painting reflected his expanding awareness of thecomplexity and meaning of tribal art and its role in the evolution of Modernism. BuckminsterFuller was on the faculty of the I.D. and was asked to head the 1949 summer session at theprogressive Black Mountain College in Ashville, North Carolina. He asked the Woelffers toteach there as well. Despite the minimal pay involved, Woelffer resigned from the I.D. to workwith Fuller, Josef and Anni Albers and other important figures for a few months in Asheville.It was during this time that he painted his Bucky Fuller series. The Woelffers then went toNew York City where they met fellow Abstract Expressionists including Jackson Pollock andLee Krasner in Springs, Long Island. The Life magazine article on Pollock had just appearedand he urged Woelffer to stay in New York and have a second show at Artists Gallery.Woelffer couldn’t imagine coping with the pressures of New York City, consequently they went onto spend six months in the Yucatan visiting the pyramids and other ancient sites. They rented ahouse in Campeche where, “Woelffer embraced risk and chance as the primary means tocarry his art to a new level, and to make objects that corresponded to his inner life.” (6)

In 1950, he returned to Chicago, and the I.D. awarded him an honorary degree so he was pre-pared when Mitchell Wilder, director of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, offered him aposition at the school. Ever up for adventure, the Woelffers drove to Colorado in the 1927

Rolls Royce sedan that heacquired by bartering a painting.During the six years there, awayfrom the distractions of urbanlife, Woelffer came into his ownas a painter incorporating theAutomatism of the AbstractSurrealists, with a vocabulary ofgraphic gestures reminscent ofpictographs. Despite not being inNew York, he was given a secondshow at Artists Gallery in 1951. Tomake those paintings, he spreadhis canvas on the floor and workedwith brushes with four-foot longhandles combining oil and enamel.

Similar works from this period are the earliest included in this exhibition, selected by MannySilverman and gallery director Linda Hooper, many from works in the Woelffer estate heldin trust by Otis College of Art and Design. The earliest, Untitled (1951) is acrylic on masoniteand features angled and rounded slashes of red and ultramarine blue over solid shapes ofpale blue and black. Woelffer often used such dynamic colors, though another work in theshow, Homage to A. (1953) oil and chalk on canvas, is nearly monochromatic with circular andtriangular shapes layered in shades of pale gray. Three works from 1955, all oil on board, controlthe bold and searing colors—crimsons, emeralds, cobalt blues, balanced with black — asthough iterating a language with Xs and Os and approximations of numbers or partial lettersall nestled together.

Woelffer had been laying pieces of painted paper on his compositions to assess a form or colorbefore completing a work, but liking the effect, he incorporated the collaged elements asaspects of the finished work. This is apparent in an untitled syncopated arrangement ofturquoise and coral on an adobe ground from 1954-56 and a startling untitled saffron andblack work from 1957 made with roof cement as well as oil and collage on canvas.

Artists, of course, always assess the view from the studio window and in Colorado Springs,Woelffer took pleasure in the view of bantering crows and other birds. Young Crow (1956),oil on canvas, shows the black bird with multiple wings, as though trying to fly in a grayatmosphere. The oil and collage on masonite painting, Bird and Earthworms (1956) has a thinsliver of sky and roughly realized orange gesture of a bird above an expanse of black paint

UNTITLED , c.1955. Oil and collage on board, 18 1/8 x 21 1/8 inches

flicked by the white linesof the ill-fated fare. It isthought that he also wasinfluenced by the sleekmodern angles of the planesflying around the nearbyAir Force academy.

In 1953, Wilder left Coloradoand was replaced by JamesByrnes, who had previous-ly been curator at the LosAngeles County Museumof History, Science andArt and a brave earlyadvocate of the Abstract

Expressionists. He had already included Woelffer’s work in his influential exhibitionContemporary Painting in the United States. He invited Robert Motherwell to teach thesummer session and the two artists forged a close friendship that lasted their entire lives.Motherwell too, had been influenced by Matta and had been using collage as a paintingdevice. Motherwell later wrote that Woelffer was “as literate about modern art as anyAmerican whom I had encountered…” (7)

In 1955, Byrnes left Colorado and so did the Woelffers. They sold their house and went toNew York to visit Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler. Then they went to Europe and forthe next eighteen months, lived in Forio d’Ischia, Naples. They had just about run out ofmoney when Woelffer heard that Wilder, then director of Chouinard, was looking for apainting instructor. Woelffer sent him a note and was promptly invited to teach at the schoolthen located near MacArthur Park, known both for training animators to work for WaltDisney and for its progressive art department. After Wilder was hired by the Amon CarterMuseum, Gerald Nordland became director of Chouinard and a life-long supporter of bothWoelffers and their art. The Woelffers bought a modern house on Dustin Street in Mt.Washington and arranged their collection of tribal art amongst pieces by friends andcolleagues, Matta, Motherwell and Miró, described by Woelffer as the “3 Ms.”

Woelffer was not the first formal abstract painter to be seduced into new ways of working uponsettling in Los Angeles: Sam Francis, Richard Diebenkorn, Lee Mullican all were matureartists when they decided to settle in a city that was bursting with unrealized potential. Therewere not many art dealers but Paul Kantor Gallery in Beverly Hills was exhibiting the Abstract

UNTITLED, c.1955. Oil and collage on board, 20 x 24 1/2 inches

Expressionists and Woelffer initially showed there. Eventually Woelffer felt he was being over-shadowed by Kantor’s support for those who had claimed success on the East Coast and in 1961,Woelffer began showing with Ed Primus and David Stuart on La Cienega Boulevard next toFerus. Primus also showed tribal art and Woelffer felt a personal connection there.

Like Mullican, Francis and others, Woelffer felt that his dedication to discovering a spiritualdimension in his abstract art was met with less resistance in Los Angeles. Critics were less hostileto this notion, less married to the doctrine of pure form over content. Not that Woelffer abandonedhis contacts in New York, Clement Greenberg included Woelffer’s paintings in his 1964 exhibitionPost-Painterly Abstractionwhich opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art before travel-ing to two additional venues.

In this exhibition, Blue Boy (1961), oil and collage on canvas, is a singular example of the shiftin Woelffer’s sensibilities that had begun in Forio but matured in Los Angeles. The brilliantorange background supports a rectangle of ivory imprinted with the dark mark of Woelffer’spalm and outspread fingers. The words “Blue Boy” echo the mark of the hand of Miró andprimitive cave painting but it can be seen around that time as well in the work of Jasper Johns.Woelffer’s use of language had evolved in Forio and dovetailed with the growing interest ofyounger artists like Johns and Ruscha. Woelffer continued to pursue working with his hand-prints, even painting with the tips of his fingers to make little dots. In the 1960s, a reductive,graphic direction manifested in his work in simplified compositions of fat straight strokescentered in planes of color. In 1962, the Pasadena Art Museum, the most adventuresomeinstitution in the area at that time, mounted a survey of Woelffer’s work from 1946 to 1962.

Over the course of the next decade, Woelffer thrived in Los Angeles. He was among the first tocreate lithographs for June Wayne, whom he had known in Chicago. She gave him a fellow-ship at her Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1961 where he made dozens of print editionsover the course of the next twenty years. He traveled regularly; in 1965 on a U.S StateDepartment grant to lecture and exhibit in Turkey, and in 1967 on a John Simon GuggenheimFellowship to travel in Europe, and in 1970 to teach at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Chouinard merged with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to become CaliforniaInstitute of the Arts (CalArts), and the campus was moved to the suburb of Valencia in 1971.Woelffer continued to teach there until 1973 when he was hired as chair of the paintingdepartment at Otis Art Institute, as it was then called. In 1974, he received a NationalEndowment for the Arts grant and his ally Byrnes organized a survey of his work for theNewport Harbor Art Museum. The combination invigorated his outlook.

In the early 1970s, his acrylic on canvas paintings featured spare, vertical strokes bisecting a

plane of solid color. There are several in this exhibition. Though still “Untitled”, he sometimesparenthetically added the word “Poet” to the title. In this exhibition, Red Poet (1977) is anacrylic on canvas of vibrant red vertical strokes against black and cobalt blue with a lilacedge along the left side. A vertical painting of chlorinated blue with markings of black oilstick is titled Italian Poem (1977), a reminscence of his time in Forio, perhaps.

In 1978, Woelffer resigned his position as chair to work as a painting instructor at Otis, wherehe continued until 1992, though the last three years he worked only with graduate students.His long interest in collage had achieved scale and drama as he used Color-Aid papers, coatedin brilliant tones but when torn, the white edge read as a line in the composition. This exhibitionincludes A Bird for John (1981), the angular dark birds familiar from his Colorado Springspaintings rendered as torn sheets of black paper against sky blue paper ground. Not asbaroque as the late cut-outs of Henri Matisse but similarly sophisticated.

On a personal level, thinking of the time that he met the great artists at their home, he washonored to receive a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 1984. He further reduced his paintings to simplearabesques made with oil stick, along with small patches of torn Color-Aid paper arrangedsparingly on smooth painted backgrounds. Visible Escape (1984) is an entirely black canvaswith white and blue calligraphic marks and patches of blue and red paper collage. It anticipated the

Emerson and Dina Woelffer, Dustin Street, Mt. Washington, early 1960s

work of the next two decades that he made with bold white paint on a black background.Woelffer was by then losing his eyesight to macular degeneration. He could see at an anglebut not straight ahead. He did not give up but rather experimented until he discovered thatif he painted in thick white strokes on black backgrounds, he could see the results. It wasan especially difficult time since he could not drive and Dina had passed away in 1990. Hemarried Marilu Lopez in 1996. In 1998, Manny Silverman exhibited 70 of these works hung ina salon style from floor to ceiling, illustrating the point that at 83, Woelffer still had somerhythmic chops. His Xs and Os filled the gallery with a dramatic impact that was not lost onWilliam Wilson, then art critic for the Los Angeles Times. In his review of the exhibition,Wilson said that “the works had the quality of contemporary street graffiti,” (8) a commentthat delighted Woelffer.

Woelffer was the epitome of mid-century modern art in practice and outlook, an artist whobelieved in the utopian ideals of his predecessors and who was willing to share his insightswith his students and over the course of many decades, and left a considerable legacy toSouthern California. He was a formalist, an intuitive, an artist who believed that abstractpainting could be made with a spiritual drive that could be found easily in tribal art if not somuch in the intellectualized art of the developed Western world. He wondered why one kindof knowledge should be used to obliterate another higher form of knowledge. Woelfferremained steadfast in his dedication to his art as a calling.

Ruscha and CalArts published a catalogue to accompany Emerson Woelffer: A Solo Flight,the 2003 retrospective exhibition at Redcat Gallery. In addition to the comprehensive essayby Gerald Nordland, it included remarks and remembrances by twenty-two major artistsincluding the veteran Ynez Johnston, who had known him since 1954. According to her,Woelffer’s parting words were simply, “Keep Painting.”

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, California Collector, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, isKCRW art critic and author of several books on modern and contemporary art.

1. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, The Master of Modernism, Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1998.2. Ed Ruscha, Emerson Woelffer: A Solo Flight (Redcat, California Institute of the Arts, 2003) pg 9.3. Drohojowska-Philp, op. cit. 4. Ibid. 5. When Lee Mullican was assigned a similar position, it reinforced his committment to a non-objective

art. Both Mullican and Woelffer were admirers of Paul Klee and his use of line as well as tribal art. Both wound up in L.A. where their pursuit of spiritual meaning found an easier acceptance.

6. Gerald Nordland, Emerson Woelffer: A Solo Flight (Redcat, California Institute of the Arts, 2003) pg 14.

7. Ibid. pg 17.8. Wilson, William, “ ‘Studio’ shows Woelffer’s Place in History,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1998.

UNTITLED , 1954-55. Oil and collage on canvas, 68 x 104 inches

HOMAGE TO A, 1953. Oil and chalk on canvas, 37 x 41 inches

UNTITLED, 1957. Roof cement, oil and collage on canvas, 39 x 36 inches

BIRD AND EARTHWORMS, 1956. Oil and collage on masonite, 38 x 26 inches

YOUNG CROW, 1956. Oil on canvas, 22 x 18 inches

BIRD, 1956. Ink on paper, 11 x 15 inches

UNTITLED, 1956. Ink on paper, 11 x 15 inches

UNTITLED, 1956. Charcoal and pastel on paper, 19 x 25 inches

FORIO, 1958. Collage, 16 7/8 x 13 3/4 inches

UNTITLED, 1958. Collage on envelope, 9 3/8 x 7 1/8 inches

FORIO D’ISCHIA NAPOLI ITALIA, 1959. Oil on canvas, 19 1/2 x 15 1/2 inches

BLUE BOY, 1961. Oil and collage on canvas, 23 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches

UNTITLED (POET) , c 1972-73. Acrylic on canvas, 15 7/8 x 12 inches

UNTITLED (POET), c 1973. Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 12 inches

UNTITLED, 1961. Oil on canvasboard, 15 7/8 x 19 7/8 inches

RED POET , 1977. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 inches

UNTITLED , 1969. Color-Aid paper collage, 24 x 18 inches

UNTITLED , 1969. Color-Aid paper collage, 24 x 18 inches

A BIRD FOR JOHN , 1981. Torn paper collage, 45 1/2 x 32 1/4 inches

VISIBLE ESCAPE, 1984. Oil, acrylic, oil stick and collage on canvas, 30 x 24 inches

UNTITLED , 1996, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches

21

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:

Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AKAmon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TXAsheville Art Museum, Asheville, NCBaltimore Art Museum, Baltimore, MDBauhaus Archives, Berlin, GermanyBibliotheque Nationale, Paris, FranceBlack Mountain College Museum + Art Center, Asheville, NCCity of Santa Monica, CAColorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, COFogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MAFresno Art Museum, Fresno, CAHonolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, HIIllinois State Museum, Chicago Gallery, Chicago, ILIndianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, INIsrael Museum, Jerusalem, IsraelKansas City Museum, Kansas City, MOKrannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign, ILLa Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CALos Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CAThe Museum of Modern Art, New York, NYMuseum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CAMuseum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, NMMilwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WINew Orleans Museum, New Orleans, LONewport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA (now Orange County Museum of Art)Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan, UTNorth Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NCPasadena Museum of Modern Art, Pasadena, CA (now Norton Simon Museum)Portland Art Museum, Portland, ORSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CASeattle Art Museum, Seattle, WASmithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, DCThe Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, CAUniversity Art Museum, California State University at Long Beach, CAUniversity Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, CAUniversity of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, IAWashington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, DCWhitney Museum of American Art, New York, NYWooster Art Museum, Wooster, MAYellowstone Art Museum, Billings, MT

CREDITS

Catalogue EssayHunter Drohojowska-PhilpLos Angeles, CA

DesignSuzanne Bernstein Design, Inc.Miami, FL

Catalogue CoordinatorLinda Hooper, DirectorManny Silverman Gallery

Edition1000

Manny Silverman Gallery619 North Almont DriveLos Angeles, CA 90069T: 310 659 8256 F: 310 659 1001

www.mannysilvermangallery.com

MANNY S ILVERMAN GALLERY

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA