Oscar Chelimsky, an abstract painter and art teacher, passed away on January 19, 2010, at the age of 87. Although his long illness kept him from participating directly in the writing of this biography, it is not only heavily inflected by his views, comments and souvenirs, but also seeks to carry out an objective he expressed many years ago:
“For some time now, I’ve been intending to write about my work and life, to leave a kind of written tract detailing my passage on this earth so that what little advance my individual adventure may have engendered can, in turn, enlighten some other artist whose plight would make him or her sensitive to my peregrinations, and thereby, perhaps, alleviate some self-doubt or even unlock a stymied brush.”
This biographical paper, then, is dedicated to that special audience of artists, but also includes in its intended readership all those who are interested in the “individual adventures” of 20th century painting.
There are at present five sections, covering his career until the year 1960. These are: (1) Beginnings, New York City; (2) Paris, 1948-1953; (3) Relationships with Georges Braque, Fernand Leger and Constantin Brancusi; (4) Paris, 1954-1959; and (5) Definition and Significance of the Big Open Form. It is envisaged that three more sections will be posted at a later date, to include: (6) Paris, 1960-1970; (7) Return to the United States: 1970 to the present; and (8) Questions of Legacy.
Beginnings, New York City
Oscar Chelimsky, born in New York City in 1923, knew from early childhood that he wanted to be an artist. He studied painting formally at Cooper Union, with Sidney Delevante in 1939, then at the Art Students’ League with Paul Burlin in 1946 (his studies had been interrupted by World War II); he worked with Hans Hofmann under the G.I. Bill in 1947-1948, and also with Stanley William Hayter at his Atelier 17 printshop. Informally, however, he had been painting by himself since the age of six, and lied about his age in order to go to classes given at the WPA in the 1930s. As he told Michael Plante (whose interview with him can be accessed in the Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art), “I was 13, and they didn’t let you in until you were 15, or something like that, probably because of the nude models.” (Plante, 1990)
Among the artist friends he made during this period of apprenticeship were Sidney Gordin, Reuben Tam, Hyde Solomon, Alcopley, Richard Poussette-Dart, Al Mullen, Al Freedberg, George Morrison, Martin Bloom, Larry Rivers, Nell Blaine, and Bob Conover. Chelimsky exhibited his work in group shows with some of these artists – he spoke of them to Plante as “the avant-garde students” – and in 1945, he had his first one-man show in New York City at the Galerie Neuf. He exhibited again in various group shows (at the Laurel Gallery, in 1946, among others), and he characterized his work of the Hofmann period to Michael Plante as follows: “I was still involved with the object, with the Matisse and Picasso ideas of de-formation: in other words, taking the object and doing something with it. Although I did many drawings and sketches that were totally abstract and liberated – India ink works – it wasn’t until years later, until I understood the external world in terms of signs, that I was able to release the type of energy which I had had as a young kid.”
In February 1946, Chelimsky married Eleanor Fine, a concert pianist, and the two lived for a while in an apartment on West 52nd Street, overlooking the Hudson River. A second apartment served as a studio. Two years later, in May of 1948, they left for Fontainebleau, in France, to work for three months at the American Conservatory there. The three months, however, turned into 22 years, and the Chelimskys remained in Europe until 1970, first in Paris and then in Brussels. It was in Paris that Chelimsky found nourishment for his art, achieved his particular identity on the cusp of American and French painting, and saw the development of his work take off. As he told John Ashbery, “Paris is the place for me where daily rapport with society is easiest, and people are willing to look at my work.” (Ashbery, 1966)
Paris: 1948-1953
One can discern a number of periods in the life and work of Oscar Chelimsky in Paris. These periods are not discrete, however, but merge into each other in the same way that Chelimsky’s work itself would evolve, building and changing over the years. A first period might well take us through his initial steps in France: from his stay in Fontainebleau (1948), through his first Paris one-man show at the Galerie Breteau (1949), through the founding of the American cooperative Galerie Huit (1950), through the realization of his Red Painting (1950) and its showing at the seventh Salon de Mai (1951), and finally, to his first one-man show at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher (1953), which consecrated his entry into the roster of artists supported financially by that gallery. Also important to discuss, because of their effects on his artistic development, are his relationships with three older artists: Georges Braque, Fernand Leger, and Constantin Brancusi.
Despite the changes that took place in Chelimsky’s work in these and later years, there is an underlying preoccupation that seems to have changed very little over time, and that is his chosen problem of conciliating structure with spontaneity. In the words of Michel Conil-Lacoste, writing in XXe Siecle, “Chelimsky’s painting is marked by persistent efforts to surmount the duality which, he says, obsesses him, and which remains at the center of his work: the conflict form-liberty. At the beginning, of course, it is form which dominates. In the United States and then in Paris until 1950, Chelimsky paints still-life after still-life in which the table, the mandolin, the vase, are simply pretexts for exploration in form. These tables charged with objects (“tables parees”), which still reflect preoccupations associated with Picasso and Matisse, are not oil paintings, however, but are done in caseine, which dries faster than oil, requires great sureness of line and gesture, and permits no second-thoughts. This series of works, at first high in color, later shows a taste for the monochrome: everything is blue, or everything is red. So it is that the action, in Chelimsky’s paintings of this period, becomes form: under his brush, he sees the sign become petrified, or, put another way, sees his own liberty signified across this material that forbids correction.” (Conil-Lacoste, 1962)
Chelimsky’s first years in Paris were characterized by high energy, joy at the interest and attention his work aroused in Paris art circles, and great good luck in two areas: finding a large, light, two-story studio next door to the Rumanian sculptor, Constantin Brancusi, and discovering communities of new artist friends, both American and French. Many in the American community were, like him, former GIs, but some, like Mark Tobey, Janice Biala and her husband, Alain Brustlein, Henri Goetz, Martin Craig, Day Schnabel, Herman Cherry, and a number of other, older artists, were not. Some of his young friends joined Chelimsky in a group show he organized in 1949 at the Galerie St. Placide: John Anderson, Roy Boot, Burt Hasen, Jonah Kinigstein, Norman Rubington, Shinkichi Tajiri, and Hugh Weiss, among others. They joined him again at the Hacker Gallery in New York City (the show was called “Americans in Paris,” ), which saw the addition of Carmen d’Avino, Sidney Geist, Gabe Kohn, Jules Olitski, Reggie Pollack and Charles Semser, among others, to the earlier roster. All of these artists, with many others (including Joe Downing, Harold Cousins, John Koenig, Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe and Beauford Delaney) would join together again in the founding of Galerie Huit, also in 1950.
Among Chelimsky’s earliest French friends, just after his stay at Fontainebleau in the summer of 1948, were Georges and Odette Coulon, who lent him his first Paris studio on the rue Vercingetorix, and Rene and Denise Breteau, who gave him his first Paris one-man show in 1949. A little later, with the help of dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, whom Chelimsky went to visit, “en pelerinage,” in his gallery, rue d’Astorg, he became acquainted with Georges Braque, Fernand Leger and Jacques Villon, as well as Franz Kupka, who lived and worked next door to Villon. Then, during the 1950-1953 period, Chelimsky began to frequent a number of different galleries and formed friendships with many French painters and sculptors: for example, Gerard Schneider, Pierre Soulages and Andre Marfaing, the critic Guy Marester, and especially, Etienne Hajdu, Vieira da Sylva, Roger Bissiere and his son Louttre, Zao-Wou-Ki, Costa Coulentianos, and Arpad Szenes, along with Jean Bazaine, Wilfrid Moser, Louis Nallard, Marcel Fiorini, Nicholas de Stael, Jean Bertholle and others. He also became very close with his next-door neighbor at the cite d’artistes in the Impasse Ronsin, Constantin Brancusi, whom he saw nearly every day, and who offered him a monthly stipend when he thought the Chelimsky funds might be running low. Other Ecole de Paris friends included Orlando Pelayo , Antoni Clave and a large Spanish contingent, along wth Pierre Alechinsky, Pierre Corneille, and Karel Appel of the Dutch Cobra Group.
These French and American relationships, and the constant mutual viewing of work-in-progress among all these artists, would eventually enable Chelimsky to serve as a unique link between the post-war art of France and that of the United States. Denis Milhau, a curator at the Musee de Toulouse in France, was both prescient and brave in picking that up, noting Chelimsky’s influence not only on the development and evolution of French abstract and “informal” art (“l’art dit informel”), but also his influence upon – and inclusion within – “a genuinely universal movement of plastic creation.” (Milhau, 1967). This influence had been both noticeable and pervasive, beginning in 1951 with the showing of his “Red Painting,” and continuing throughout the fifties and sixties with his Big Open Form series. Still, the art-politics of the period (i.e., the small war for art-world dominance between New York and Paris) surely made it politically difficult, and required considerable courage, for a Frenchman to assert an American influence on School of Paris painting.
First Paris One-Man Show: Chez Breteau (1949)
Chelimsky’s first Paris one-man show occurred in 1949, at the Galerie Breteau, on the rue Bonaparte. The show drew attention from both French and American critics – in particular, a writer for the Paris Edition of the New York Herald Tribune noted: “the boy is a born painter” (Devoluy, 1949) – and the gallery itself was quite a remarkable place. As Chelimsky recalled in his interview with Michael Plante, “The Breteau was not a gallery in the sense of Kahnweiler or Jeanne Bucher, both of which took on artists and followed them, because the Breteaus didn’t have the wherewithal to do that. But every Monday night they would have open house and all the avant-garde painters and critics came. The Paris art world then was like one great big family. There weren’t any enormous financial doings; rather, artists were interested in finding out what was happening, which way to go. It was a time when people contacted each other and talked, and everybody went to the Breteau open house. It had a quality that we don’t find today because art is now such a big business. In short, the gallery had a beautiful atmosphere and the reviews of my show were good.” (Plante, 1990)
Galerie Huit (1950-1952)
At about the same time, the French Government bought a Chelimsky painting, and a little later came the founding of Galerie Huit (1950) by American artists working in Paris. This particular adventure was the basis for a recent exhibition in New York entitled “Galerie Huit: American Artists in Paris 1950-1952 (Studio Eighteen Gallery, November-December 2002). After the St. Placide group show and that of the Hacker Gallery (see above), many young American painters and sculptors, spending a year or two in Paris, needed a place to show their work. By a happy coincidence, Robert Rosenwald, heir to the Sears fortune, had, according to a French reporter, “ vacated the little shop which had served as his studio to go to the South of France, and his friends, thinking about using the locale to show their work, decided to form an artists’ cooperative.” (Boudaille, 1950) A Herald Tribune reporter was more interested in the financial details: “Galerie 8, tucked in between a book store and a shoe repair shop at 8, rue St. Julien-le-Pauvre, is a co-operative effort by fifty young American artists who want to exhibit and sell their works. Two committee members – Oscar Chelimsky of New York, and Haywood Rivers of North Carolina – filled us in on Galerie 8 which went into operation this month. Member artists pay 100 francs” (this was about 30 cents, the dollar being worth approximately 300 francs in those days) and “the cost of operating the gallery is 30,000 francs a month” (about $100) “which includes the rent, telephone and the services of a receptionist, the only paid employee.” (Horton, 1950) Chelimsky took on the task of writing a constitution for the gallery, which members considered essential to deter what they saw as predictable efforts by individual artists or groups of artists to take control of the gallery. There was enormous enthusiasm and excitement surrounding this entire enterprise, during which meetings and parties and the mounting of new exhibits continued ceaselessly. Some beautiful shows were produced, including the first one given to the painter John Anderson and the sculptor Shinkichi Tajiri, but the adventure lasted only a few years, even though it received excellent critical notice, and drew mobs of people at every opening, including Alice B. Toklas who never missed a vernissage at Galerie 8.
The Red Painting (1950), Shown at the Salon de Mai (1951)
Perhaps the best way to describe the importance of this painting in Chelimsky’s development as an artist, and in his influence on the Paris art world, is to quote from a letter he wrote to his friend, Sidney Geist, some thirty years later, when he took time out to document a bit of forgotten art history: “Dear Sid, As I told you over the phone when you called last Thursday, I’m sending you some background material on the painting I’ll be submitting in case there are any questions or discussions about it. For me, it is quite an important painting and I feel that it is also an integral part of the Paris art scene of the early 50’s. It was painted in 1950, shortly after you left Paris; perhaps you saw it in my studio when you returned in 1956. I have resisted selling it all these years not only because it is unequivocally the single most important work I’ve done in terms of identifying for me the meaning of “form” in painting – it was seminal for me, a turning point; everything I’ve done since, such as the “Big Open Form” series, has been built on what I got to understand from doing that work – but also because its formal aspects had an impact on the art of a number of artists working in Paris at that time, among these, de Stael, Sam Francis, and Bazaine.”
“When the painting was shown in the Seventh Salon de Mai in 1951, it was extremely well received: (1) it was hung smack in the center of the American section; (2) Hans Hartung admired it (I was introduced to him by Bill Hayter whom I knew from N.Y.); (3) it led to my receiving a permanent place at the Salon de Mai; and (4) it was pretty much on the strength of this painting that Galerie Jeanne Bucher decided to handle my work.”
“In May 1953, I had my first one-person show at Jeanne Bucher. It was here that de Stael saw the painting and here that I met him for the first time. If you look at Stael’s work in 1952 and 1953, you can see the differences of approach between the two years. That type of ‘clustering’ of a single color does not exist in his ’52 works; what is similar to my painting from a formal point of view is the ‘opening’ of an object into freely created, distinct forms, as in his “Arbre Rouge” of 1953. (All the paintings in my 1953 show were built on that formal idea.) I’m not suggesting that Stael’s use of this idea was crucial to his development: he was already a mature artist, adept at thinking in terms of flat forms. But this type of clustering of one color offered him an interesting variation on his fundamental approach of creating a tension between thickly trowelled forms.”
“ With Sam Francis, on the other hand, it is possible that the idea was indeed crucial to his development. He saw my Red Painting at the 1951 Salon de Mai. He also had a painting in that salon, although his biographer, Peter Selz, erroneously gives the date as 1950: you and I, Sid, both showed at the Salon de Mai in 1950; Sam did not.” (Author’s note: See the Catalogues for the Sixth (1950) and Seventh (1951) Salons de Mai.) “At that time, in 1951, he was doing a vague and formless type of work which Sweeney described, after a visit to Sam’s studio in 1952, as ‘strange abstract compositions in pale gray and white.’(Selz, 1975) It was not until 1953 that his work began using one-color clustering as its basic creative element. However, the specific formal similarity between my Red Painting of 1950 and Sam’s “Big Red” of 1953 (shown on page 41 of Selz’ monograph) as well as many later paintings, has to do with the creation of a surface broken into varying forms of a single color (I’ve always called these “signs,” he calls them “corpuscles” or “platelets”), between which other colors come through, giving the sense of a world underneath. Note also that in the monograph, opposite the reproduction of the 1953 painting “Big Red,” there’s a photo of Sam with Michel Tapie (page 40) in front of one of his large cluster paintings very much in the style of “Big Red.” Again, Peter Selz backdates erroneously – he says the photo is from 1950, but this is impossible since the painting behind Sam and Michel was done in 1953.” (Author’s note: This painting, “Circular Blue,” is presented as Plate No. 70, on page 142, with no date assigned to it, making it the only undated painting in all the 161 Plates reproduced in the monograph. Fortunately, however, the date can still be found in the List of Plates, page 6, which reads, “Plate 70, Circular Blue, 1953.”)
“As far as Bazaine is concerned, there is a striking similarity in the formal preoccupations between his work in 1961 (See E. Lucie-Smith’s “Movements in Art since 1945”) and my own development with respect to signs and clusters. Given Bazaine’s work of the 1950’s, with which we are all familiar, his change toward a clustering of deep-valued forms separated by light-valued forms — both of which are almost equally worked-up – is self-evident. We were friends, as you may remember; he came often to the openings at Jeanne Bucher, and we had supper from time to time at Marie-Elena Vieira da Sylva’s studio.” (Chelimsky, 1986)
Chelimsky also mentions in his letter to Geist that, in addition to the Salon de Mai, and his one-man show at Jeanne Bucher, the Red Painting was shown at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in January 1951, and at the Galerie des Presses Litteraires de France, in March 1951, both in Paris. (The Red Painting is discussed further, below, in the section entitled, “Exhibition of Gouaches with Louis Nallard,” 1957.)
First One-Man Show at Galerie Jeanne Bucher (1953)
In short, a notable evolution in Chelimsky’s way of characterizing the space/form relationship had occurred between 1948 and 1953, and his show at Jeanne Bucher, was entirely devoted to paintings showing that evolution. Michel Conil-Lacoste described some of these early changes, noting especially the move toward abstraction which accompanied Chelimsky’s effort to balance structure and spontaneity, in his article for XXe Siecle: “The turning point toward abstraction comes with the painting, ‘Three Tables’ from 1952. It’s with this canvas that we see appear for the first time the calligraphy which Chelimsky will make one of his essential means of expression. But we won’t see it fully exploited until the very beautiful series using broken forms (‘formes dechiquetees’), executed somewhat later in 1952, and where that calligraphy – as distinct from his current work – is more apt to be angular than curvilinear. Here the ‘real,’ already greatly transposed, dwindles further and further away, pressured insistently by space, as if eaten by the speckled white of the background, until it consists of nothing more than a few signs. But these signs, born to signify negative space, these residual signs, Chelimsky will now use them as a positive element in his painting. This game of see-saw by which the sign pivots from negative to positive, we find it constantly in the esthetic adventure of Chelimsky’s work, from one composition to another, from one stage to the next: the opaque becomes fluid, the values alternate, the background plays hide-and-seek with the theme. At the same time, the calligraphy grows more complex or simpler, the fugue may be in two, three or four voices. The essential, however, resides in the spontaneity of the work, and Chelimsky’s exhibition of 1953 at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher offered an impressive panorama of all these qualities.” (Conil-Lacoste, 1962) The show was, in sum, well received and its success would lead to a number of other one-man shows at the same gallery
That same year (1953), Chelimsky exhibited a painting at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, in a show entitled “The Classic Tradition in Contemporary Art,” chosen by James Johnson Sweeney and George L. K. Morris. Also, through this period (1948-1953), Chelimsky exhibited at all the major Paris salons (the Salon d’Automne, the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, the Surindependants, the Salon d’Hiver, the Salon de Mai, Realites Nouvelles, and the Salon d’Octobre), and also participated in six group shows at various Paris galleries.
Relationships with Georges Braque, Fernand Leger, and Constantin Brancusi
Georges Braque
Chelimsky, in his interview with Michael Plante, recalled his first meetings with Braque as follows: “I would see him from time to time, and – unlike Picasso or Brancusi – Braque was not a bohemian. He lived in a large, middle-class house with beautiful gardens at the outskirts of Paris, near the Cite Universitaire, in that area around the Porte d’Orleans. I would always call before I came and he would be waiting in his sheepskin vest and a cap of the sort you’d expect a captain on a yacht to wear. His studio was on the top story of this large house, you had to get to the third story via a very narrow staircase, and he always stood at the top and greeted me. He was not a very open person, like Leger, for instance, who was warm and friendly; Braque, instead, was very reserved. His studio was huge, with a lot of enormous green plants, and perhaps twenty different paintings he was working on. Some of them were lying on the floor, some of them were backed to the wall…. But though he lived in this relatively bourgeois way, what he said was always unexpected and original. For instance, I said to him, ‘What is your conception of beauty? What is beauty?’ He looked at me as if I were mad, which I probably was to ask him that, and he said, ‘Well, beauty is when you pick up an old brush with the hairs hanging in the wrong direction and it does the exact service that you want it to do, that’s beauty.’ (Plante, 1990)
Braque would become quite irritated at the idea that anyone could think of him as either an intellectual or a revolutionary. Chelimsky quoted Braque as telling him: “I’m against intellectualism or Renaissance idealism in any form; I don’t defend ideas, I expose them. Of course, an artist is subject to his time, but he also illuminates it. It’s a continual up-and-back; however, a 20th century painter will always be a 20th century painter. I’m no revolutionary. What counts for me are the ‘rapports,’ the relationships between form and color, between objects, and this has always been a constant among great artists. Objects are nothing in themselves: they only exist when a rapport exists between them. I believe it’s always form and color that lead the artist to his subject or his poetry. So it’s the meeting of two objects that interests me and those rapports are infinite.” (Chelimsky, 1951)
Chelimsky himself believed “more in the evolution of ideas than in their rupture. New ideas that come around tend to seem like a rupture because they arrive as inspiration, but I think that when they’re of consequence, it’s that they are in some way an evolution. They may emerge as a reaction, a hatred of what came before, but still, you have to know what came before in order to react to it.” And he was especially fond of Braque’s famous anti-intellectualism that “every work of art begins with an idea but becomes a work only when the idea is erased.” (Plante, 1990)
Braque’s state funeral in 1963 seemed like a sharp break from the private, almost reclusive qualities that were most noticeable about the painter, especially during his last period. But it was nonetheless a remarkable event in which the French government was expressing, perhaps somewhat truculently, a view that great artists should be treated as national heroes in the same way that soldiers or patriots or heads of state are treated. No one could have misunderstood either the playing of Beethoven’s Funeral March “on the death of a hero” from the Eroica, or Malraux’s blurted comment that he hoped the ceremony could atone in some measure for the anonymity which had characterized the burials of so many great artists in the past. In this state tribute, said Malraux, “the impoverished obsequies of Modigliani and the sinister burial of Van Gogh are revenged.” (Flanner, 1988) By the same token, of course, Malraux was elevating Braque to the levels of Modigliani and Van Gogh, an act of fairly obvious realpolitik in the year 1963, when the New York and Paris art worlds were grappling for dominance.
Fernand Leger
Chelimsky’s first impression of Leger, whom he met in 1951, was one of size and breadth. “He had this very solid presence, like a rock or a piece of architecture which made his mental agility, his sense of humor, his smile, all the more surprising and delightful.” Like Braque, he wanted no part of philosophy or “ intellectualism.” Chelimsky’s notes of the period quote him as saying: “Everything I do is entirely plastic, not philosophic. Art is the domain of sensibility, not intelligence. The beginning of a work for me is almost animalistic. Then later, intelligence does enter in when you organize the canvas. But things always begin without a clear plan, without my having any sense of where I’m going.” (Chelimsky, 1951)
Although Braque did speak about how inevitable it was for an artist to reflect his period in history, Leger truly embraced that idea. “I lean heavily on this epoch we live in,” he said. “Fifty years ago, life was melodious and painting was Impressionist. The peaceful village, the life of the time could be reflected in paintings constructed simply by rapports between colors. Today life is broken up. We live among violent contrasts and we moderns translate them through structure, volume and line. Impressionism abandoned form, but Cubism returned to it and I’m a part of that. But also, I’ve been influenced by other things in my life: the war, my time in America, the ubiquity of machines, all these little men lost in all that ironwork. What I’ve looked for is the rapport between the human body and monumentality, the contrasts between men, machines and clouds: hard forms, soft forms, half-soft forms.” (Chelimsky, 1951)
Leger said he believed that “the two great lines in modern painting – that of Delacroix the Romantic, and that of Ingres the Classic – are still in evidence today, with Picasso in the romantic role and Braque and myself as the classicists. But we’re all instinctive, even Ingres. The best paintings are those that are done hot, not cold. When I begin a painting, the birth is purely instinctive, color and form are instinctive. I’m in the middle of a battle, everything’s at risk, everything can change. Order comes later as I work.” (Chelimsky, 1951) In sum, Leger saw himself aligned with Braque as a classicist, but his way of working was certainly different since Braque began with an idea that he expected to see obliterated, whereas Leger started from instinct and organized the canvas afterwards.
Leger loved music, especially American jazz, but he was also friendly with Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger (members of the composers’ group known as “Les Six”). His sense of his own modernity, along with his “classicism,” left him cool both to the Romantics and to the Renaissance, which he detested, not critically like Braque, but viscerally: “I’ll take Roman against Gothic any day,” he said.
Leger died in the summer of 1955, and was greatly missed by everyone who knew him for the quality of his friendship, his reverence for all things human, his powerful presence and his subtle mind. Chelimsky remembers him as a man without the typical anger of the artist, utterly aware of the world’s slings and arrows and utterly willing to cope with them. He seemed quite comfortable living with contradictions, and told Chelimsky a story about his dealer, Louis Carre, with whom he apparently had the same ambivalent relation that so many artists have with their dealers. “You see this pen, Chelimsky? It belongs to Carre, it’s his favorite pen. I stole it one day, he knows I have it, I bring it out and use it every time he comes to the studio, but he can’t say anything about it. What revenge, what delicious revenge.”
Constantin Brancusi
Brancusi, on the other hand, never had a French dealer and wouldn’t let one in his studio. (Chelimsky, 1958) In taking this stance, he characteristically went further in what he said openly than did Braque or Leger, but all were in agreement about the thorny nature of the artist/dealer partnership. Of course, Chelimsky had a much closer relation to Brancusi than he did with Braque or Leger, because he and Brancusi were next-door neighbors and saw each other nearly every day for many years. Some of that relationship is described in Chelimsky’s 1958 memoir of the sculptor.
Brancusi also joined Braque and Leger in an often-expressed contempt for “intellectualism” in art. Chelimsky mentions in his memoir that Brancusi considered intelligence an impediment to creativity, and often said that finding a means to make it recede into the background was the first step in the creative process. “An artist seems to feel that he must stop everything and get to work, that work itself is something special, sacred, apart from life. On the contrary, a man should work as he breathes, easily and naturally, without thinking too much about it. In fact, I can imagine no better way of getting to work than drifting into it after sweeping the floor and cleaning up. An artist should always do his own chores.” (Chelimsky, 1958)
Brancusi was indeed perpetually polishing or dusting the sculptures arrayed in his studio like acolytes in a cathedral. There were the “Bird in Flight,” Mademoiselle Pogany,” The Endless Column,” so many others. But the studio itself was a work of art, with its 14-foot ceiling, half of which came up at an angle and was entirely glass, with simple white-washed walls, and, of course, the sculptures populating the huge space, arranged singly or in carefully-placed groups. In his notes of the period, Chelimsky describes his first impressions of Brancusi as proud, independent, sensitive and subject to intense mood changes – from joy to gloom and back – that could occur within minutes. But he was surprised to find that Brancusi was well aware of his own volatility and could measure its effects on others with great accuracy. Once, observing a problem Chelimsky was having in using a pair of scissors, he took them brusquely from the painter’s hands, left the studio without a word and returned ten minutes later with the tool repaired. But before Chelimsky, a little taken aback by the turn of events, could even start to thank him, Brancusi , with tears in his eyes, was actually thanking Chelimsky for allowing him to sharpen the scissors. (Chelimsky, 1953)
What Chelimsky refers to in his notes as “Brancusi’s malicious smile” again reflects the mercurial complexity of the sculptor’s personality. Chelimsky wrote, “Brancusi’s smile seemed to say that there was a certain complicity between us, since we both believed firmly that the ridiculousness of human nature was beyond redemption but that actually, he was the one – as between the two of us – who had the capacity to envision the true extent of the abyss. In other words, his smile made for a warm, family-friendly relationship, but with a distinct superiority on his side. The healing effect of this radiance always astonished me because it directly opposed another of Brancusi’s personality traits that was immediately evident upon encountering him, namely, his unwavering guardedness, his eternally vigilant defense, his body armor on which was written, “Do not assume that there is anything between us.” (Chelimsky, 1953)
In a similar way, when Brancusi came to Chelimsky’s studio to see his newly-constructed balcony, “he was in high good humor as he mounted the staircase. Then he saw the neat living-space lit by a skylight, with double-bed, piano and tiny kitchen, and again departed abruptly, his face clouded over.” In one of these black moods, he would often lecture Chelimsky about revving the motor of his old Renault too much, or putting too many bottles in the trash after a party (“people will believe we’re all drunkards here”), or keeping his hands in his pockets as he talked. But he would always come around later, usually in a matter of minutes, knock at the door, and beg forgiveness. To Chelimsky, he was a loving friend and totally authentic artist.
His last days were darkened by great loneliness: he was ill, had not been able to work for many years, and he seemed like someone waiting for death. When Chelimsky talked about this sadly with the painter Jacques Villon, and criticized the French art world for taking so little notice of Brancusi, Villon remarked that although Brancusi had not perhaps chosen to be isolated, the fact of that isolation was certainly a result of his life choices. Maybe so, at least in part. But it’s also the case, as the art critic, Charles Estienne wrote (at the time of Sweeney’s Guggenheim exhibition of Brancusi’s work), that “Brancusi’s career has the singularity of having taken place entirely in Paris, and yet of having been supported almost entirely by a few big American collectors. This is a scandalous fact, but it is true.” (Estienne, 1955) Even more scandalous, perhaps, is the fact that while Brancusi himself went almost uncelebrated in the Paris of the fifties – as an example, Chelimsky’s friend, Georges Coulon, a Prix de Rome sculptor, had never even heard Brancusi’s name – countless School of Paris artists were thriving on the use of his ideas.
Still another scandalous fact is that this was hardly a unique occurrence in France. Among many other neglected artists, there is also Mondrian, about whom Michel Seuphor wrote painfully: “No French museum or gallery appears to be interested in this painter who spent 24 years of his life in Paris and who, during his stay here, painted more than 200 canvases which are today classics of abstract art.” (Seuphor, 1954) Again, as with Brancusi, there was no shortage of prosperous imitators.
Brancusi died in March, 1957. His funeral, at a Rumanian church, was extremely moving – Georges Salles, a French museum director and government administrator, gave a beautiful and insightful eulogy – but it was marred by a skirmish that broke out at the Montparnasse Cemetery, between leftists and rightists among Brancusi’s Rumanian supporters. Chelimsky noted some years later that “After Brancusi’s casket was lowered into the ground, an altercation broke out. Suddenly, voices, speaking Rumanian, were raised; people were standing with their heads thrust so far forward that noses were only inches apart. Mourners screamed at each other with bulging eyes and red faces. These fisticuffs – cheek by jowl with sadness and bereavement – were peculiarly shocking, seeming to come out of nowhere, almost lunatic in their passionate inappropriateness.” (Chelimsky, 1960)
Paris: 1954-1959
One can (again, arbitrarily), discern a second discrete period of work during Oscar Chelimsky’s stay in Paris. This period brackets the years 1954 through 1959, a time when his preoccupations with positive and negative space, with broken signs, and with calligraphy, found their integration in his series of Big Open Form paintings. The first of these paintings, acquired by the sculptor, Etienne Hajdu, was done in 1955 and later exhibited in Chelimsky’s second one-man show. Looking across this five-year period, it seems as if the most important milestones are probably the following six: (1) the group show of “Five Americans in Europe,” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1955); (2) Chelimsky’s second one-man show at Jeanne Bucher (1956); (3) a show of gouaches, with the painter Louis Nallard, at Galerie 93 (1957); (4) Chelimsky’s one-man show at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1958); and (5) his third one-man show at Jeanne Bucher (1959). It’s also important (6) to look a little more carefully at his concept of the Big Open Form, whose progress and development occurred throughout this period.
The Stedelijk Museum Show (1955)
Beginning in the fall of 1952, Chelimsky’s studio in the Impasse Ronsin, whose unprotected left wall faced an open space used by the French Hospital Administration as a garage for its largest trucks, was hit hard, every night, between 2 and 3 A.M., by one or another of these trucks during parking maneuvers. Chelimsky’s complaints were met by the director of the garage with the comment, “Well, you know we want you artists out of there; we need the space for our trucks.” Although the neighbors mobilized, and Brancusi called an official at the French Ministry of Arts and Letters, all was to no avail. In 1952 France, hospital bureaucrats trumped art bureaucrats by a wide margin. So around Christmas time, quite predictably, Chelimsky’s studio wall fell in, after a particularly effective set of truck-bumps. At 3 in the morning, the Chelimskys were bounced out of bed – the balcony managed to stay standing on one 2X6 pillar so that they could scramble down uninjured – to face the December cold in pajamas.
Brancusi, concerned and angry, took photos of the enormous hole in the Chelimsky studio-wall, anticipating a major lawsuit. But instead, two ladies arrived at around 6 A.M., dispatched by the Hospital Administration, and offered the Chelimskys a big studio across the street (at 12, rather than 11, impasse Ronsin), on condition, however, that they give up all claims to the demolished studio and agree not to bring suit for purposeful endangerment. Since the alternative was pain, lawyers, and small hope of success, the Chelimskys moved into the promised quarters the next day.
One of the first visitors to the new studio was Willem Sandberg, Director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, who knocked on the door one morning and asked if he could look at Chelimsky’s latest work. Sandberg had decided it was time for a show of American artists working in Europe and had come to ask for Chelimsky’s participation. Within an hour, a deal was reached and the show eventually took place at the Stedelijk Museum featuring the paintings of Alcopley, Chelimsky, Fontaine, Levee and Parker. Each artist was given a large room for his work.
The show caused something of a sensation in Amsterdam, especially among young Dutch painters who visited it over and over, and it was again , like the Galerie Huit experience, an occasion for Chelimsky to feel comfortably American in Europe. The trip back to Paris after the show, with John Levee, marked the beginning of a friendship between them, and his meeting with the art critic, Jerome Mellquist, was also a fruitful one. Unlike James Baldwin, with whom he had coffee occasionally in a café on the rue de Tournon, Chelimsky didn’t find himself alchemized into an American from the moment he first touched French soil. Instead, as time passed, different parts of his character responded to different aspects of both the French and American cultures, so that finding bridges between the two became as important a part of his life as it was of his painting. He would continue to show with both American and French painters, and the direction his work took seemed to emerge from this dual foundation.
Mellquist, an American critic, commenting some years later on Chelimsky’s paintings at the Stedelijk, said that “what always characterizes Chelimsky is that the tension in his painting might be compared to a chord pulled taut. If plucked, it resounds. This is his music.” (Mellquist, 1962) Guy Marester, a French critic, commenting on the same paintings, put it this way: “This slightly granular texture, this matte finish, this weather-beaten surface, his painting certainly possesses them. But where these means serve other painters as a way of achieving freedom of expression, Chelimsky, it would seem, is using them as the basis of a plastic experience –very concentrated and very meticulous—under the apparent spontaneity that we first discover.” (Marester, 1954)
This same year (1955), Chelimsky received another important visit, that of the American dealer, Theodore Schempp, who arrived one day, sent by the sculptor, Hajdu, and bought ten paintings for the collection of the Baroness de Pantz in New York. Also, during the 1955 Easter vacation, the Chelimskys found and bought an old stone house in the Ardeche, built in 1663, situated just outside a small village (population : 80) in which the French Wars of Religion were still being fought. The landscape was rocky, arid and Biblical, limestone seemed to be everywhere, especially noticeable in great chalky cliffs bordering a nearby river, and the sun shone hot, even in April, as the deeds were signed at the notary’s place of business. It was only 20 kilometers or so away from the Chelimskys’ door that the Chauvet caves would be first discovered and explored in 1994, some forty years later.
Second One-Man Show at Galerie Jeanne Bucher (1956)
Chelimsky’s second show at Jeanne Bucher, well received in Paris, marked a new stage in his development with respect to the use of signs and the Big Open Form. Jacques Dupin, a French poet and art critic, was one of the first to understand what was happening in these new canvases and what the direction and potential of the work might be. He wrote: “If Chelimsky starts with the sign, it’s an OPEN sign, a pure infusion of life on the canvas, a call from one sign to a second sign and to the multitude of signs which occupy the in-and-out space of the painting. In this way, a language of perfect plastic clarity arises, which itself is reabsorbed into the totality of the painting. Above and beyond the dialogue between one sign and another, there are – spread across the entire surface – signs that superimpose themselves and combine in innumerable conflicts, sources of energy, and principles of harmony, thereby generating movement, nourishing tensions, and developing rhythms.” (Dupin, 1956)
It was in this second show at Jeanne Bucher that Chelimsky exhibited his first series of Big Open Form paintings. Also, in September of 1956, Chelimsky’s son, Thomas, was born, after a beautiful summer in the Ardeche.
Exhibition of Gouaches, with Louis Nallard (1957)
This show came about because of the success of Chelimsky’s painting in an exhibition commemorating the publication of the book, “Seize Peintres de la Jeune Ecole de Paris,” at the Galerie 93 in 1956. The gouaches exhibited here showed a marked evolution in the artist’s use of signs. Looking at Chelimsky’s development over the 1951-1958 period, an American art historian, David Gariff, has noted that Chelimsky’s work of the early fifties “was already characterized by his quest for a balance between the expressive, gestural significance of painting, and a more controlled and stable formal approach. The attempt to reconcile and to synthesize these two pictorial methods became the driving force behind his art. In his finest works, it is the precarious and contradictory struggle of these two polarities that infuses his paintings with both their expressive lyricism and formal strength. Chelimsky’s path toward this reconciliation begins in 1951 with a work entitled ‘Red Painting.’ In it, he treats a still-life, comprised of a table and assorted objects, as an arrangement of flat, hard-edged ciphers or signs unified by a single dominant color. The integrity of the two-dimensional space and flat color (legacies of Picasso and Matisse) have been translated into a new consciousness in which the objects are of secondary importance and where unity of space, form, and color is sought through the interrelationship of the signs. An active play of positive and negative space is already implied, but order and stability win out. Of particular interest here, however, is Chelimsky’s growing concern with a more calligraphic and liberated sign – a sign associated with gesture and stroke rather than with area and mass.” Gariff further noted, in the work of the late fifties, a change from a classical to a baroque emphasis, allowing a more natural spatial integration of the entire canvas as a Big Open Form, which Gariff saw as “the major concept to emerge from Chelimsky’s paintings.” (Gariff, 1982)
The exhibition at Galerie 93, along with the 1953 and 1956 one-man shows at Jeanne Bucher, together mark a period in Paris when Chelimsky’s influence began to be clearly reflected in the work of French artists, as noted earlier. This could be seen not only among Michel Tapie’s “tachistes” and others (Milhau, 1967), but also among many School of Paris painters such as Pierre Alechinsky, for example. Alechinsky’s work changed dramatically between 1955 and 1957, as he began to use Chelimsky’s calligraphic mode of integrating space, and also “to employ the sign as a motor force, a base, a point of departure.” (Chelimsky, 1986) Chelimsky saw this, of course, but so did many others, among them the French collector, Gilbert Feruch, who pointed out to Chelimsky one evening at dinner, that “Alechinsky has changed his style, you know; he’s taken your handwriting, your way of covering the canvas.” (Chelimsky, 1986 and Author’s Note)
Other abstract painters similarly reflective of Chelimsky’s influence at this time were, for example, Batta Mihailovitch,Jean Miotte, Byzantios, Jacques Busse, Halpern, Paul Rebeyrolle and Jean-Paul Riopelle. Among sculptors, the work of his friend Hajdu also reflected the open form influence, starting in 1961, especially with his India-ink works and his “estampilles.” Dora Vallier would note Hajdu’s efforts to break open both space and form in her preface to his 1968 show at Knoedler in Paris, and then would describe his use of “signes eclatees” (broken signs) and “signes ouverts” (open signs) to characterize both his India-ink drawings and other works, in her preface to a later show of Hajdu’s at the Galerie Louis Carre. (Vallier, 1968, and Vallier, 1982)
To Chelimsky, this sense of excitement around his work, these borrowings, were certainly not a problem. On the contrary, they were for him one of the great attractions of living, working and showing in the Paris of the fifties and sixties. To him, it was a measure of vitality that so many artists were looking at his paintings and reflecting what they saw in transformations of their own work. But just as important to him, he says, at this juncture of his development, was the ability – as traditional in the Paris art world as the borrowing and lending of ideas — to form cross-generational friendships among gifted painters and sculptors he could see on a daily basis: in their studios, in his, or at the Coupole or St. Germain cafes, for example. It was a time of remarkable artistic comradeship, this period in Paris after the Second World War, and it seemed as if everyone’s door was always open.
Meanwhile, in 1957, New York’s Guggenheim Museum acquired a Chelimsky painting and it was shown at an exhibition at the Museum among other recently acquired works, including paintings by Magnelli, Marca-Relli, Miro, Nicholson, Picasso, and Soulages, and sculptures by Brancusi and Hajdu. (12 June through 11 August, 1957)
One-Man Show at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1958)
This exhibition was a much more extensive presentation of Big Open Form paintings than had been seen before this date. Dupin, in his introduction to the show, wrote that “if Chelimsky’s paintings envelop us in an irresistible sentiment of both fullness and freedom, this is because of his attention to negative space, to emptiness, which inserts itself like a counterpoint into the play of forms and colors and the invisible articulation of the signs. There is a kind of circulation throughout the whole painting of this negative space, this emptiness, which is not in fact empty but alive and luminous, and which rises from the bottom to the top across the entire space of the painting.” (Dupin, 1958) The Belgian critic, R. V. Gindertael, remarked Chelimsky’s conciliation of the form/liberty conflict (discussed at length some years later by Michel Conil-Lacoste in 1962) and noted that he “discovered in these works the accomplishment of a tendency toward equilibrium and harmony which Chelimsky satisfies freely and naturally but in a manner that is voluntarily unstable in the fullness of his plastic concept.” (Gindertael, 1958)
David Gariff, writing in 1982, would comment that, for Chelimsky, the Big Open Form was “the attempt to realize and to relate both positive and negative space as gestural signs. His goal is not the dominance of one over the other, but the achievement of a subtle balance between the two within the energized environment of the act/gesture. The process of a spatial reconciliation, however, takes on a protean quality in Chelimsky’s paintings. The variety and sophistication of his signs are matched by the refinement of his compositional eye. The adventure of his work resides in the transmission to the viewer of the intensity of an artist’s confrontation with the bare canvas and in the realization that we have witnessed a particular moment in the artist’s evolution as a human being.” (Gariff, 1982)
In this same year of 1958, Chelimsky also showed with Harold Cousins, John Levee and Helen Phillips in an exhibition organized by Darthea Speyer at the American Cultural Center, rue du Dragon. The show was entitled, “Quatre Artistes Americains de Paris,” and all four, with their spouses, became friends.
Third One-Man Show at Galerie Jeanne Bucher (1959)
This third one-man show was widely reviewed in the Paris press and very well attended. The painter, Mark Tobey bought a painting, and this was a huge joy to Chelimsky. Among the reviewers, Charles Delloye wrote in Art d’Aujourd’hui: “ Oscar Chelimsky’s recent show at Galerie Jeanne Bucher provoked great interest not only because of the high quality of the work presented, but also because of the profound modification in the painter’s style. Not that one can speak of rupture or convulsion, but rather of a natural and coherent evolution.” Delloye noted the continuing process of conciliating or mediating opposites in Chelimsky’s work, and commented that the different mediations “were never so profound that one could not see the earlier stages battling with the later ones, not as vestiges or traces, but as an implicit foundation that is both structural and dynamic.” (Delloye, 1959))
France-Observateur commented: “More and more now, each work of this young American painter constitutes a total entity from which no part of the whole can be dissociated. Probably, the basis of this unity lies in a liberation of sensitivity, liberation which dominates Chelimsky’s present expression and allows the work access to the level of the irrevocable. The form is integrated into the space and light of the canvas, with full poetic fluidity. This alone is responsible for the solidity of the general plastic organization, and also, through its subtleties, for the cohesion and the homogeneity that the different spaces build up among themselves.” (Chevalier, 1959)
Finally, Michel Courtois wrote that, “In his recent canvases, Chelimsky, who liked to express himself violently in furious battles, war-dances of explosive elements, generally written in large signs on rough-grained and crusty surfaces, manifests a rigorous effort to keep his élans in check and to discipline them. The raging conflict that made his paintings explode up to now has reduced itself to a plastic problem laid down in different terms and resolved with firmness. This effort to canalize his temperament has in no way caused his painting to lose its dynamism. It has gained in expressive force and, above all, in organic solidity. In this metamorphosis, the color has assumed a more austere, gray-black dominance, and the texture, a ductility which reveals a more conscious hand. This polished work confers upon the whole a rugged charm, a power and conviction which rewards Chelimsky for his pains and demonstrates both his profundity and his inspiration.” (Courtois, 1959)
Chelimsky’s works were now in a number of European and American collections, including: Ansiaux, the Beauvais Museum, Martin Becker, Bing, Bouloi, Bourdouil, Eve Daniel, Georges Fall, Luce Ferry, Gilbert Feruch, Goulandris, the Guggenheim Museum, Hajdu, Kelaidis, Ludovic and Claude Masse, Micheli, Moltzau, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, de Pantz, Schempp, Schneider, Cesarina Silva, Speyer, Stynen, Szenes, Gallery Bettie Thommen, Mark Tobey, Veron, Vieira da Silva, and Volnay.
At about this time, Noel Barber wrote in Holiday Magazine that “In this Parisian jungle of feverish, thwarted ambition, there now live 400 American painters and sculptors. Few of them have achieved success, although some, like Oscar Chelimsky, exhibit regularly and sell easily. Chelimsky, who moved to Europe some years ago, is now in steady demand.” (Barber, 1960) Evidently, for Barber, and many others in the new world of the sixties, showing and selling had come to be what a painter’s life was all about; indeed, Andy Warhol’s concept of art as a market product, was waiting in the wings. Chelimsky found these ideas alien, and he shared Andre Gide’s concern about the changes that seemed to be taking place in the way artists now measured their successes and failures: “This is precisely where the leaders of the new generation differ from us, judging as they do a work according to its immediate efficacy. They also seek immediate success, while we found it quite natural to remain unknown, unappreciated and ignored until the age of forty-five. What we aimed for was duration.” (Cited in Lottman, 1982)
In short, as the sixties approached, Chelimsky found himself at odds with these “leaders of the new generation.” To him, art was not a marketing exercise, nor “a means to an end (glory, money, etc.) but a necessity, an act entirely justifiable in itself.” (Chelimsky, 1960) Like Gide, his aim was duration, and he pursued that end largely through his development and realization of the Big Open Form.
Definition and Significance of the Big Open Form
Toward a Working Definition
If we use some of the critical comments cited above to try to define the Big Open Form concept, we come up with a description of various of its elements, such as the idea of big forms that are opened by smaller broken forms or signs, each of which is a form in itself; the use of subtraction (that is, the painting-out of forms by other forms); the creation of transparent simultaneous images; an emphasis on the relation between positive and negative space; a surface broken into various forms or clusters of a single color through which other colors come through, suggesting a world underneath; and the idea of space engendering form, rather than the contrary. But these elements come together to become artistically meaningful only through the spontaneity of Chelimsky’s “act of painting.” There are thus, as various critics have noted, two major components involved in the Big Open Form concept, and there is a crucial play between them – between structure and spontaneity, between reason and emotion – that creates the artistic expression through its tensions.
Chelimsky, in his notes and interviews over the years, further defines the concept:
On the Act of Painting (1960): “It’s not difficult to start a painting with the ‘act.’ The difficulty is to end it that way. By ‘act,’ I mean that state of physical artistic dynamism which changes the entire work in a basic sense, that instant when the entire plastic concept is grasped emotionally and controlled technically.”
On the Instant in Art (1961): “Unlike other arts, painting has an instantaneous existence. Literature and music take place in time, and they can thus be created in time. But in painting, the closer one gets to the instantaneous act, the gestural sign, the closer and truer one is to the artistic experience.”
On the Meaning of the Sign (1961): “The trick is to utilize, in a plastic and essentially rational way, a sign that is derived from a gesture, which, in turn, is the reflection of an irrational, excessive sentiment that we can perhaps name the state of creative grace.”
On the Open Form (1960): “The open form for me is concerned with the way two surfaces in a painting engage each other, the manner in which they slide into each other, or else slice and divide the space between them.”
On the Relation Between the Sign and the Open Form (Plante, 1990): “The open form is the culmination of my use of the sign, in the sense that the entire painting is a sign (that is, a Big Open Form), and that sign is itself broken up into smaller signs, and those broken-up signs are put down in such a way as to not lose the sense of the single sign, yet at the same time, to keep the sense of all the individual signs, to have them play together. In truth, the whole thing is a single image: when a viewer turns a corner and sees one of these paintings on the wall, I want there to be a first impression of a single image, a Big Open Form. Then, with a closer look, there are all kinds of things going on which break up into signs, and even layered signs over signs.”
On the Characteristics of Open-Form Painting (1998): “What can we say distinguishes this work? I think, perhaps, freedom of handwriting; a line that creates a structure; forms that break down into signs; layering: that is, one brush stroke lying on top of another, not fully covering it, and resulting in a kind of duet between the two; concern for integrating image and background (positive and negative space) into a unit; the way in which the image begins and finishes somewhere beyond the rectangle of the canvas; and the aliveness of the surface via a richness of detail which does not diminish the overall strength.”
These notes by Chelimsky, along with the various descriptions made by art critics, are probably sufficient for a working definition of the Big Open Form, at least with respect to its conceptual elements and its gestural nature, which together fuse form and freedom in Chelimsky’s paintings. But this then leads to the further question of significance: once defined, what difference does it make? Where does it fit and how does it matter?
Significance of the Big Open Form
One can, of course, look at the meaning of the work of a painter in many ways: first and foremost, perhaps, across the immediate shock, the visual experience of the work, and the excitement and insights it generates in the eye and mind of the beholder. Or else, as Foucault says, “one can reconstitute the latent discourse of the painter; one can try to recapture the murmur of his intentions which are not transcribed into words, but into lines, surfaces and colors; one can try to uncover the implicit philosophy that is supposed to form his view of the world.” (Foucault, 1976)) Here, however, it seems reasonable to assert that, above and beyond the éclat of the individual paintings, Chelimsky’s work on the Big Open Form is significant in four ways:
First, it carries forward and expands earlier plastic advances. Chelimsky had been focused on the idea of the broken object and its spatial ramifications since his student days with Burlin and Hofmann, and even before that. For him, Cezanne’s view of the world as composed of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone had always been important, and he saw Cubism as the distillation of Cezanne’s ideas, not only in the way Cubist painters showed several sides of an object simultaneously, but also “in the specific way Picasso took Cezanne’s compote dish and broke it into planes. What I mean is that Picasso, in his search for new forms, took the path of broken planes; what I am doing is to take the path of an open form which simultaneously breaks up and unites both space and object.” (Chelimsky, 1952 and 1998)
Chelimsky traces the beginning of his open-form concept to the Red Painting of 1950, discussed earlier. “In my work, that painting resulted in a distinct cleavage, an explosion which created a ‘before-and-after.’ Of course, for an artist, every work is a lesson with which to go on to the next painting. But in this case, it was so decisive that it actually raised my general level of consciousness as a painter. I had already had the idea of opening the form, and it had crept into my work in small doses, little by little, step by step, until when I did the Red Painting, I was in the heat of creative excitement and another me was standing there, cool and collected, saying, ‘Yes, go ahead, go ahead, just put down completely flat red forms.’ In any case, when I had finished the painting, I felt certain that I had found a new space which itself was a ‘missing link,’ an experiential extension of Cubism.” (Chelimsky, 1998) This sense of a plastic advance grew deeper and deeper with Chelimsky’s further development of the open form, and in some ways, Chelimsky apparently saw a parallel in Stravinsky’s evocation of his own subterranean pathway: “The artist begins with an intuitive grasp of an unknown entity already possessed but not yet intelligible, an entity that will not take a definite shape except by the action of a constantly vigilant technique.” (Citation from Helen Vendler, undated, publication unknown, found on Chelimsky’s blackboard in Fairfax, Virginia, 2003)
A second way in which the Big Open Form is important lies in its conciliation of Cubism with Abstract Expressionism. This effort at conciliation, this often-noted drive to unite form and liberty in his work, seemed to Chelimsky to be at least partially a result of growing up and studying in New York at the time he did, and then working in Paris. Indeed, he was always explicit about his goal. As he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I’ve aimed at restructuring the Abstract Expressionist vocabulary in the same sense that Cezanne restructured the great Pissarro’s Impressionist vocabulary: that is, by giving it form. I believe that I am alone in having devoted my energies consistently in that direction, and I have been able to proceed only by having the “sign” as a base, and by aiming for that balance between “absolute form” and “total liberty, which resulted eventually in the Big Open Form.” (Chelimsky, 1982) Because of his long-term effort to achieve this balance, Chelimsky did not consider himself an Abstract Expressionist. First, his plastic aims were always present, together with his use of action painting techniques, so that his work could never be uniquely “a means of revelation and self-discovery.” (Rosenberg, 1963) Second, as Chelimsky himself noted, “The strong difference between the Abstract Expressionists like Pollock, Kline, etc. – those born toward the beginning of the century and those born about two decades later – is that the latter were not drawn to, or influenced by, the Surrealists.” (Chelimsky, 1980) Still, Chelimsky’s form was in fact deeply affected by Abstract Expressionist ideas and techniques, and by the instantaneous nature of action painting, so much so that for him, form and gesture, sign and brushstroke, became one and the same.
Chelimsky’s successful effort at conciliation of these two sets of ideas has been discussed by many different art critics, both French and American. (See above, for example, Michel Conil-Lacoste, Jacques Dupin, Guy Marester, Jerome Mellquist, David Gariff and others.) As Barbara Butler wrote in her account of this visual adventure, “In Chelimsky’s work, each stroke, a form in itself, is clearly stated to give a coherent pattern of swooping and darting shapes moving throughout the picture space. Each stroke counts; there are no background or inert areas. The painter manages the difficult task of sustaining the energy in each individual brushstroke without allowing the total composition to become chaotic or haphazard. The vitality of his stroke is well demonstrated in a series of ‘miniature’ watercolors, measuring no more than three by four inches, in which one or two sweeps of the brush provide the entire picture. Although this New York painter has spent most of his artistic career in Paris, his work seems to embody the best traits of our contemporary art, and it is here, more than at the Musee Galliera, that one can get a valid impression of the vitality of American painting.” (Butler, 1957)
From an art-history perspective, it’s interesting to note that Chelimsky’s dual effort at continuation and conciliation places him in both evolutionary and dialectical modes at the same time. On the one hand, his search for a new formal pathway – that is, continuing and expanding the advances of Cubism – is surely evolutionary. But on the other, conciliation is clearly dialectical in that it moves from the formal Cubist thesis (asserting the central nature of form), through the Action Painting antithesis (which rejected form in favor of self-expression), to the Big-Open-Form synthesis. This is, of course, the old Hegelian “struggle of contraries” which, combined with the spirit of continuity, has undergirded much modern painting. (Recall, for example, the Post-Impressionist path of Cezanne, synthesizing Impressionist ideas of light and shadow with the concepts of form and value that the Impressionists had abandoned when they turned away from French academism.)
A third measure of the Big Open Form’s significance comes from the way its development and realization unconsciously mirrors and retraces the specific historical movement in style from classical to baroque painting of the 16th and 17th centuries. This is to say that, in order for the Big Open Form to permit the synthesis which Chelimsky eventually achieved, his painting had had to change considerably, moving from a classical to a baroque emphasis that lent itself more naturally to his spatial integration of the canvas. Various writers (especially Conil-Lacoste, Dupin and Gariff, see above) noted the elements of tension, rhythmic energy, and movement that had emerged in his work as it evolved toward the Big Open Form. This profound and almost compulsive change in style, moving from the angular to the curvilinear in its handwriting, was critical to the achievement of his synthesis, and one can recognize it in Wolfflin’s description of the same kind of style-change to which Post-Renaissance artists resorted, as they moved away from what Wolfflin calls “closed-form classical painting, which makes of the painting a self-contained entity, pointing everywhere back to itself,” and toward “a baroque style of open-form painting which everywhere points out beyond itself and purposely looks limitless.” (Wolfflin, 1950) The journey Wolfflin describes – that taken by Northern baroque painters like Rubens away from the classical closed-form paintings of artists like Raphael – is the same as the one taken by Chelimsky after his Red Painting: that is, he was led to open-form painting by his use of the sign, which is both the basic formal element of his painting and also the source of its freedom, since that sign is derived gesturally through the spontaneity of its handwriting.
Finally, the Big Open Form concept is significant because of its influence on School of Paris painters and sculptors of the nineteen-fifties and –sixties (see the earlier discussion), and because of its consequent placement within a trans-national perspective, that is, across the prisms of both French and American art.
Paris: 1960-1970
Chelimsky’s third and last Paris period takes us from 1960 to 1970. It begins with the birth of a daughter, Catherine, in September of 1960, and ends with the return of the Chelimsky family to the United States in January of 1970. The major events of the period seem to be the following six: (1) Chelimsky’s participation in a decade-long series of exhibitions, both across France and in the United States (1959-1969) as organized by the American Cultural Center in Paris, under the leadership of Andre Malraux’s Association Francaise d’Action Artistique; (2) the beginning and early development of Chelimsky’s Repetitionist paintings; (3) a fourth one-man show at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher; (4) the loss of Chelimsky’s studio in the impasse Ronsin, and his eventually successful efforts to re-establish his workplace elsewhere (1962-1963); (5) first efforts at teaching art in Paris, and the move to Brussels, Belgium (1967); and (6) Chelimsky’s fifth one-man show at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher (1968).
As this series of events makes clear, Chelimsky continued to paint, teach and exhibit long after 1960, in Paris, in Brussels, in Washington, D.C., and in Maryland: indeed, until his battle with Parkinson’s recently made it impossible for him to continue. The author’s intent is to resume this biography as soon as possible, with the three additional sections outlined earlier: the period 1960 – 1970, including the problems posed to individual artists by the competition for art-world dominance between Paris and New York; Chelimsky’s return to the United States in 1970 and his development as a teacher (he was Chairman of the Painting Department at Maryland’s College of Art and Design); and finally, some thoughts on his legacy.
Eleanor Chelimsky.
Cleveland, Ohio, April 2010
References
ASHBERY, John, “American Sanctuary in Paris,” Art News Annual XXI, 1966, p. 146
BARBER, Noel, “The Thirty Thousand Painters of Paris,” Holiday Magazine, Jan. 1960, pp. 30-31
BOUDAILLE, Georges, “Colonies Etrangeres a Paris,” Les Arts, Aug. 18, 1950, Paris
BUTLER, Barbara, “Chelimsky,” ARTS Magazine, April, 1957
CHELIMSKY, Oscar, Letter to Sidney Geist, Aug. 5, 1986 (Author’s Note: This letter was accompanied by photos and slides of paintings by Jean Bazaine, Sam Francis, and Nicolas de Stael, showing the relationship of various of these painters’ works to Chelimsky’s “Red Painting”)
CHELIMSKY, Oscar, Personal Papers, 1951: Reminiscences of Georges Braque
CHELIMSKY, Oscar, Personal Papers, 1951: Reminiscences of Fernand Leger
CHELIMSKY, Oscar, “A Memoir of Brancusi,” ARTS, June 1958, pp. 19-21
CHELIMSKY, Oscar, Personal Papers, 1953-1960, Notes on Brancusi
CHELIMSKY, Oscar, Personal Papers, Letter to Roberta Smith, July, 1988
CHELIMSKY, Oscar, Letter to Francois Mathey, May 30, 1986 (Author’s Note: The author was present at the dinner Chelimsky refers to which took place at Feruch’s home, rue Vineuse. Gilbert Feruch collected works of the painters Pierre Tal Coat and Jean Messagier, along with those of Chelimsky, and followed the Paris art scene very closely. In addition to his comment that evening about the change in Pierre Alechinsky’s painting, he also mentioned that he believed some sort of “cabal” was forming in Paris against Chelimsky, which was somehow related to the struggle for dominance between the New York and Paris art worlds. )
CHELIMSKY, Oscar, Personal Papers, 1960
CHELIMSKY, Oscar, Personal Papers, 1960, 1961, and 1998
CHELIMSKY, Oscar, Personal Papers, 1952 and 1998
CHELIMSKY, Oscar, Letter to Hilton Kramer, April 5, 1982
CHELIMSKY, Oscar, Personal Papers, 1980
CHEVALIER, Denys, “Chelimsky,” France-Observateur, June 25, 1959
CONIL-LACOSTE, Michel, “Chelimsky,” XXe Siecle, Feb. 1962, pp. 66-68, Paris
CONIL-LACOSTE, Michel, “Le Salon des Realites Nouvelles,”Le Monde, April 22, 1960, Paris
COURTOIS. Michel, “Chelimsky,” Cahiers du Musee de Poche, No. 3, December, 1959
DELLOYE, Charles, “Chelimsky,” Art d’Aujourd’hui,” No. 23, September, 1959
DEVOLUY, John, “Art News in Paris,” N.Y. Herald Tribune, Paris Edition, April 29, 1949
DUPIN, Jacques, “Seize Peintres de la Jeune Ecole de Paris,” Cahiers du Musee de Poche, December, 1956
DUPIN, Jacques, Preface to the Exhibition of Oscar Chelimsky, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium, January 1958
ESTIENNE, Charles, “Perennite de l’Art Moderne: Brancusi,” Les Arts, 1955, Paris
FLANNER, Janet, Paris-Journal 1956-1964, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988, p. 266
FOUCAULT, Michel, The Archeology of Knowledge, Tavistock, 1972, p. 193, London
GARIFF, David, “The Open Form in Abstract Expressionism: The Art of Oscar Chelimsky,” The New Art Examiner, November 1982, Vol. 10, No. 2
HORTON, Michael, “Mostly About People,” N.Y. Herald Tribune, June 30, 1950, Paris Edition
LOTTMAN, Herbert, The Left Bank, Houghton, Mifflin, 1982, p. 230, Boston
MARESTER, Guy, “Art Aujourd’hui,” Combat, April 1954, Paris
MELLQUIST, Jerome, Preface, Exhibition of Oscar Chelimsky at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher, 1962
MILHAU, Denis, “U.S.A.: On a Decouvert l’Amerique,” Cimaise, No. 79, Jan. 1967, p. 33, Paris
PLANTE, Michael, Interview with Oscar Chelimsky for the Smithsonian Institute’s Archives of American Art, August 28, 1990, Washington, D.C.
ROSENBERG, Harold, “On Art Movements,” The New Yorker, Oct. 5, 1963, p.160
SELZ, Peter, Sam Francis, Abrams, 1975, pp. 6, 33, 40, 41, and 142, New York
SEUPHOR, Michel, “The Neglect of Mondrian,” Arts Digest, Feb. 15, 1954, p. 16
VALLIER, Dora, Preface to the Exhibition of Etienne Hajdu, Galerie M. Knoedler, Oct. 1968
VALLIER, Dora, Preface to the Exhibition of Etienne Hajdu, Galerie Louis Carre, Oct. 1982
WOLFFLIN, Heinrich, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, Dover, 1950, p. 124