JOHN HIMMELFARB SELECTED WORKSSEPTEMBER 15–OCTOBER 17, 2009

Paris TruckMixed media drawing7.5 x 11 in.2005

A Circulating Library

One of the first views a visitor encounters as they step over a high

threshold and enter the raw space that acts as a foyer in John

Himmelfarb’s Chicago studio building is of a pair of library card

catalogue cabinets stacked one upon the other. The grid of 300

drawers stands a little over 10 feet in height. The face of each

drawer is 4 x 5 ½ inches and displays a brushed chrome pull and

knurled screw-top that signifies the end of a rod which extends

back through a small hole at the bottom of the hundreds of cards

contained therein. The entire effect is that of a visual matrix that

subtly provides an introduction to what one will encounter as

one explores this center of creativity.

The carefully crafted cabinets, along with their cards, each of which

was individually typewritten by an anonymous library worker, have

been made obsolete with the advent of computer technology and

the internet. Each card possesses a discrete, abstract summary of

the book it represents, and a number which locates it within the three

dimensional space of the library building.

Information and imagination have been distilled through research and

creativity into a collection of singular works, each represented by a

card in the catalogue.

John Himmelfarb’s studio

 

509

H17s Hall, Alfred Rupert

The scientific revolution, 1500-

1800; the formation of the modern

scientific attitude.

Beacon Press, 1956

390 p.

1.Science – History I. Title

 

Himmelfarb incorporates these cards into his studio practice. He

honors their previous life by recycling them as support for drawings

he produces in a stream of consciousness that might: pun on the title

of the card’s book; use the title as inspiration or, more often than not,

disregard the title completely and create an “automatic drawing.”

They might focus on a formal concern; study another artist’s ap-

proach to a subject; make a to-do list; or capture that sparkling idea

that shows remarkable promise but is just as remarkably fleeting.

He notes the day and often the moment they are created, providing

a sort of visual diary of his thought-processes and concerns over

time. Although the library card drawings do not serve as the bedrock

source for his

artwork, they are a valuable reference tool for him and assist the

viewer in following his restless exploration of form. Occasionally, they

have been translated “verbatim,” if you will, with stunning results (see

Borrowed Time (2007), & March, 2006 library card drawing, Living)

At first glance, it is perhaps surprising that all of the artwork in this

exhibition was produced by a single artist. There is no prevailing po-

lemic, no manifesto nailed to the door. The work is consistently out-

side mainstream approaches to abstraction and figuration. On view

are paintings, sculptures, prints, ceramic vases and even tapestries.

Many approaches to subject matter are in evidence, but, like volumes

in a library, each piece is a carefully considered, discrete work, a

distillation of thought carved from decades of experience. Upon

closer examination, it is clear that these singular works are united by

elements collected in a circulating library of abstraction that the artist

has been building, literally, since birth.

Borrowed TimeWoolWoven by Fabian Cardenas Cori, Ayacucho, Peru87 x 61 in.2007

HISTORY

It is difficult to write about John Himmelfarb’s approach to making

art without noting the contribution which his family has played in its

development. Both the artist’s father, Samuel Himmelfarb (1904-1976)

and mother Eleanor (1910-2009) were accomplished artists whose

aesthetic was primarily abstract. Samuel attended art school in

Milwaukee, then Madison, Wis., supporting himself as a musician.

He found his way to New York City where he took some classes

at the Art Students League and gravitated toward work with

architectural firms. Eventually the deprivations of the Great

Depression in Gotham forced a return to the Midwest. There, he

worked through a variety of design-oriented positions before starting

his own firm. His timing was good. Corporate America was beginning

to realize that it was often cheaper and more efficient to farm out

design problems to specialists. He saw the potential for Chicago’s

growth as a national business convention center at mid-century and

successfully positioned his business to take advantage of the many

corporate conclaves and trade shows that made the city the center of

business entertainment for decades.

The Himmelfarbs continued to paint and exhibit widely. They

presented work at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Arts Club, and

other exhibition venues throughout the region. They provided what

must have been a fertile home life for a young man interested in

exploring the arts. Himmelfarb writes, “My dad designed a beautiful

house full of art, and it was full of art objects, art books, music,

trips to theater, dance, museums.” The house was (at the time of

its construction) a very contemporary design with an open plan,

dedicated studio spaces, and sited on seven heavily wooded acres

in Winfield. Young John took advantage of every opportunity to

explore the undeveloped region.

Himmelfarb is not a man who “always knew” that making art was

his destiny. A college professor encouraged him to commit to an

independent study in drawing for a semester. “After a couple of

weeks of intense drawing, self directed, the light bulb finally lit!”

Once committed, he staked out a difficult position that virtually all

of his associates except his parents discouraged —he wouldn’t

teach, he wouldn’t design, he would make his living making art.

This workmanlike approach has served the artist well as he has

built an exhibition resume that spans over 87 solo presentations,

numerous public and corporate commissions, many artist-in-

residence positions, and inclusion in major museums’ collections

throughout the U.S. and overseas during the past four decades.

Deep Green SeaAcrylic on canvas

81 x 56 in.2006

Growing up among artists who have made a practical choice to make

a living through design and not chosen art as a life-style furnished

Himmelfarb with an unpretentious sensibility in his dealings with the

world-at-large. Educated at Harvard, he has always shunned irony-

laden approaches to expression in favor of an almost blue-collar

work ethic whose aesthetic celebrates thought and personal invest-

ment. Absent is the affected rebelliousness and signature trademark

many artists feel is critical for recognition. Citing the shock of the

new as the driving force behind artistic change during the 20th Cen-

tury, the artist recently commented, “My point being, I suppose, that

choosing an approach to art that is firmly based in “visual language,”

refers to and builds on the past, and eschews the pursuit of ‘first-

ness,’ is the ultimate rebellion, paradoxically.” He rejected a move to

New York and has always approached his work with a Midwestern

practicality, purchasing a dilapidated 4-story brick building in 1971

and taking a year and a half making it habitable as both work and

living space. This prescient move, made to establish financial stability

and

escape the cycle of gentrification and escalating rents that so often

accompany artists’ urban homesteading, later allowed him to buy a

building where he now has his studio.

Recently, Himmelfarb’s work has moved in several different directions

while maintaining contact with basic stylistic signatures.

correspondences

High StyleBronze9.5 x 5 x .75 in.2003

Many artists find comfort and creative drive through a narrow focus

on subject matter or technique. Each of Giorgio Morandi’s still life

paintings tells a separate truth about form, light, color, paint

application, and patience. Josef Albers spent a lifetime parsing the

relationships of hue, value, and saturation within a square format.

Other artists seek to experience the challenge of unfamiliar media,

embracing awkward moments of uncertainty as they discover new

truths about their personal aesthetic universe. One of the most fruitful

avenues of access to develop an appreciation of John Himmelfarb’s

work is to concentrate on continuously circulating relationships of

fundamental elements over time and across media. The artwork

selected for this show represents the disparate approaches to media,

yet the consistent aesthetic sensibility, the artist has explored over

roughly 10 years as he has enlarged his technical palette.

Himmelfarb has made a career of turning two-dimensional

space inside-out and topsy-turvy: drawings so dense with imagery

they appear to be calligraphy; calligraphic paintings that balance

mark and space in an ambiguous dance of push-and-pull; colorful

iconic forms that might be pictographs, could be figurative, might

be pure abstraction; matrices of nervous line that are layered

with residual forms/shapes from earlier paintings sometimes

asserting themselves as foreground and sometimes acting as

ghosts of paintings past, pentimenti offering quiet testimony to

his persistent search for balance.

Wax Eloquent (2007) provides a clear example of one approach

to playing with space. Many of the shapes reflect sources from

the “real” world: cannon, trees, dogs, a ship. But the space

surrounding each of the forms also creates a dynamic, abstract

shape. It is through his close attention to how line and space

define form that Himmelfarb’s art achieves its restless movement

and continuous, dynamic sense of re-invention.

Wax EloquentCast iron33 x 23 in.2007

the truck arrives

HopeAcrylic on canvas38 x 60 in.2006

Himmelfarb began his considered exploration of sculpture by

casting iconic pictographic forms in bronze. Echoes of these shapes

had been present in his painting since the mid-1970s and are evident

in works such as Tool Talk (2001) and Mop (2003).

The resultant sculptures reflect their origin in the artist’s

continuing interest in calligraphic marks (see Reference, 2008).

High Style (2003) appears to be pulled from a Chinese scroll with its

crosstrees of bronze enlivened by gestural surface treatment. Party

Line (2003) uses a broad curve to imply negative space even as it

puns on telephonic history and politics. By the time he arrived at

Stretch and Rock Me (both 2003) he was making figuratively abstract

objects that successfully activate the space surrounding them while

remaining thoroughly flat forms. Leaning in Your Direction, also from

2003, is heavier, both physically and conceptually. The figurative

work evokes thoughts of an archaic Northern European figurine with

its broad planes, carefully placed holes, and sensitive patina.

Two library card drawings from 2005 seem to indicate a shift in

attention toward a quintessentially American subject matter. On July

24, a tow truck appears alone inside a frame of iconic pictographs.

And in Paris on July 26, 2005, on a library card for “The Mammals of

North America,” by E. Raymond Hall, a pencil drawing incorporates

arched elements of his Inland Romance series paintings from 2003

as cargo for what may be a firetruck. On the back, the artist has

written “at the restaurant near filles di cavaliers 10 PM ONZIEME/

ART; 80 RUE Amelot 75011; 0143 38 8525.” The definitive nature of

his legend affirms the significance of the moment.

PerseveranceAcrylic on canvas53 x 133 in.2006

Perseverance, a painting from 2006, reflects his blossoming inter-

est in the subject. The wall-sized painting is an energetic accretion

of jots, marks, color shapes, and a truck image that seems less of a

picture than the result of flotsam coalescing at the surface.

Trucks continue to appear with regularity on library cards throughout

the period from 2005 to the present. But it was a fellowship at the

Arts in Industry program in Kohler, Wisconsin during the winter of

2007 that allowed the artist to begin seriously pursuing a three-

dimensional approach to this new topic. Immersing himself in the

experience, he worked twelve to fifteen-hour days throughout the

three month period taking every advantage of the remarkable

opportunity and exploring varied approaches to ceramics,

welded steel, cast brass, and cast iron.

Greek Opera, Reefer, Prepared and Bird in Hand (all 2007) emerged

from this period of wide-ranging creativity. Greek Opera, with its

six-foot length, is a hulking, militaristic amalgamation of Humvee

and Mesa Verde ruins and is on long term loan to a private collector.

Reefer makes reference “to a refrigerated truck, but also to a reef,

like you’d find in the ocean,” the artist said recently. The organic

work, with its drippy, droopy, crusty forms appears to have been

dredged from a South Pacific underwater graveyard for World War II

relics.

ReeferCast brass14.75 x 30.5 x 9 in.2007

Himmelfarb quickly began to refine and apply his characteristic

spatial game to the new medium. The viewer will make out the

restless line threading throughout his oeuvre in both Prepared

and Bird in Hand. But, Bird in Hand, in particular, announces a

familiar, yet freshly articulated, voice.

We immediately recognize the old, beaten-up truck. However,

Himmelfarb has once again turned space inside out, or more

correctly, abandoned space as we normally experience it and

chosen to use the truck icon as a platform for experimenting

with layered space and line. It’s as if Irene Ryan and Georges

Braque got together to design a moving van. Himmelfarb’s

gesture, his calligraphy, his pictographic shapes and

ambiguous space are all there—but now it’s 3-D.

recent paintings

InventoryAcrylic on canvas48 x 60 in.2008

A comparison of three recent paintings provides insight into

Himmelfarb’s general attitude toward art-making. Despite employing

different approaches in each work, none are seen as more or less

precious than the other.

Much of the artist’s attention in the past two years has been spent

on exploring and enlarging his understanding of the truck as a

subject. 2008’s Inventory functions much as Wax Eloquent—a

listing of approaches and images that, this time, have to do with

trucks. Some are dark on a light ground, some light on a dark

ground, some frontal, some side view. Himmelfarb has lifted the

lumpy-bumpy surface treatment from the three-dimensional work

and deftly transposed it to canvas with a sense of urgency,

layering and incorporating the drips and splashes that occurred

as he attacked the surface.

Dug In (2008) is more like a blind contour drawing where the

student’s pencil carefully maintains contact with his page as he

draws from the nude without looking at his results. Himmelfarb’s

line is no less engaged as it rambles across the surface creating

luscious shapes and forms that at first glance seem as though they

might define familiar cargo, but upon closer examination, dissolve

into a loaded brushmark that’s as delicious as Welch’s grape jelly.

With Revelation (2009), he combines aspects of Inventory and Dug

In to create a work that marries line, shape, and form with content—

here the viewer experiences parts of the architectonic load visible in

the library card drawing from 2005 and bits and pieces of other

Inland Romance paintings, as well.

RevelationAcrylic on canvas38 x 60 in.2009

Dug inAcrylic on canvas38 x 60 in.2008

Rewriting

Bird in HandCast iron16 x 27 x 13 in.2007

The time at Kohler casting his fleet of trucks whet Himmelfarb’s

appetite for challenge. In 2008, he acquired a 1949 International

Harvester model KB-1 pickup with the idea in mind that he would

create one of these works in the “real world.” The viewer’s experi-

ence of Conversion (2009) shifts through several phases: first, there’s

the curiosity factor—What is this stuff? Gradually, one begins to pick

out automobile grilles, two-man saw blades, farm whatchamacallits,

and other obscure pieces of sculptural metal that have been welded

and painted in a seemingly helter-skelter fashion. An antique

typewriter and 16 mm projector imply the presence of a narrative

known only to the artist. Himmelfarb addresses automotive history

by making this a lil’ Red Pickup.

Finally, as if the viewer’s eyes are finally getting used to the dark,

the ‘art’ part of the piece begins to surface. Here are shapes, lines,

and gently curved planes which provide subtly graduated value

relationships in abstract spatial arrangement. Here are forms and

shapes that have iconic meaning and identity in their other lives,

lives which have been subsumed in service to the composition at

hand. Here is a sculptural realization of many of his painterly

ideals. Once again, he’s checked out his own book, rewritten it,

and presented it anew.

Over the past four decades John Himmelfarb has built a complex

and compelling set of approaches to creating abstract works that re-

main firmly outside mainstream stylistic impulses. While tangling and

teasing out iconic images in the language of abstraction in one

series, he has incorporated references to real world objects such as

plants, buildings, landscapes and trucks in other series of works.

His complex vision continues to unfold a rich dialogue of color and

theme that, together, form a sumptuous library of recurring, yet

freshly resonant, images for the viewer to ponder.

ConversionFound objects11 x 25 x 10 ft.2008

show datesOPENING RECEPTIONSEPTEMBER 24–4:30 to 7:30 pm

GEOFFREY BATESgEOFFREy bATES HAS WORKED OVER THIRTY YEARS AS AN ARTS PROFESSIONAL. hE IS CURRENTLY DIRECTOR AND CURATOR OF THE NATHAN MANILOW SCULPTURE PARK AT GOVERNORS STATE UNIVERSITY AT UNIVERSITY PARK, ILLINOIS.

SEPTEMBER 15–OCTOBER 17, 2009

More info ABOUT JOHNwww.johnhimmelfarb.com