himmelfarb, circulating library
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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
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