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Aristodimos Kaldis: Discarding the Unessentials

The history of art is an untidy affair. Instead of the orderly series of neatly defined movements

chronicled by survey courses, it is probably better described as a shapeless constellation of sometimes

recalcitrant individuals. That some of them, at a given time, share assumptions about what a work of art

could (or should) be, gives rise to those survey course categories and -- more importantly -- to the idea of

a zeitgeist or at least, a mainstream. Yet there are always artists who bypass or are bypassed by such

collective aspirations, who choose to pursue, often in isolation, directions that have nothing to do with

dominant ideas of what is possible or desirable. More remarkable are artists who are at once "insiders"

and "independents" -- painters or sculptors who are part of the mainstream circle yet remain stubbornly

apart from the mainstream aesthetic. Fairfield Porter, a fixture in the social and intellectual life of the

Abstract Expressionists who determinedly painted naturalistic images of his domestic landscape and his

family, belongs to this select order of unclassifiable individuals. So does Aristodimos Kaldis.

Kaldis was a legendary figure in the post-war New York artists' vanguard, a multilingual

polymath famous for his mane of unruly hair, his impressive eyebrows, and his flamboyant, trailing

scarves. He was famous, too, for his voluble discourses on art -- and on much else, besides. He was

described as "able to speak on the grand design of the universe" and once delivered a lecture at one of the

celebrated gatherings known as The Artists Club on "The American Artist as Magician, Healer, Outcast,

Redeemer, and Savior." A relentlessly gregarious participant in the downtown art world, Kaldis seems to

have known everybody. He counted Gorky, Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning as friends; Elaine de

Kooning painted his portrait. And more.

Yet for all his notoriety as an outsize personality, Kaldis was not simply an art world curiousity,

but a serious painter, albeit a self-taught one who began to paint only after having done many other

things. His original, expressionist images were admired by his artist friends and his exhibitions were well

received by critics and discriminating viewers. The famously exacting Albert Barnes bought one of

Kaldis's figure paintings out of his first one-man show in New York for his Merion, Pennsylvania

collection. In a letter confirming the sale, Barnes rather pompously informed the artist that he found the

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painting, Negro Looking at Art, 1941, represented "a personal expression of definite aesthetic merit."

Twenty years later, a traveling show of Kaldis's work was held during the innovative Festival dei Due

Mondi in Spoleto, Italy, and still later, in 1975 and 1977, he was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships.

Still, Kaldis remained something of a cult figure, an oddball "painter's painter" whose work was

not only unlike that of his artist friends, but seemed to defy conventional categories altogether. During

his lifetime, his best known pictures were an ongoing series of fragmented, luminous evocations of an

Aegean world remembered from his early years in Greece: a paradisiacal, sun-drenched coastal

landscape of steep hills and deep valleys dotted with geometric buildings. That these free-wheeling

images are based on memory, rather than observation, is part of their considerable charm. "Nostalgia,"

Kaldis told an interviewer, "enables the artist to imbue his work with fantasy."

These pictures were generally greeted enthusiastically, but interpreted in sometimes

contradictory ways. Those who knew of Kaldis's varied history, before he started to paint, were

sometimes deceived by the playful simplicity of his pictures into thinking he was a naif. Those who

knew of his close connections with the New York School sometimes discussed him as a kind of not-so-

abstract expressionist. Those who looked harder realized that his paintings' glowing touches of brilliant

color and their shorthand references to buildings, trees, and animals owed something to Kandinsky,

perhaps even something to Klee. There's some truth in all of these notons, of course, yet the unstable,

pulsating space and shifting scale of Kaldis's pictures, like their radiant light, are his own. Space seems

to expand and contract, almost at the artist's (or the viewer's) will, demanding to be explored in the way

that the complexities of classical Chinese landscape paintings must be explored; the viewer wanders

through the vast panorama, mentally descending narrow paths and climbing up craggy mountains,

stopping to contemplate a white-domed church, a ladder, a farmyard. Light is evoked by expanses of

white punctuated by small nodes of intense primary hues, a combination that at once suggests infinite

space and a natural world bleached by the dazzle of ferocious sunlight.

While these appealing landscapes remain among Kaldis's best known works, they in fact

represent only part of his efforts. Especially in first decade or so of his career, he painted, in addition to

his rather schematic remembered images of Greece and the occasional religious painting, ambitious

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interiors, still lifes, portraits, and figures -- such as the one acquired by Barnes -- all apparently rooted in

recent experience. Like his later, more fluid landscapes, Kaldis's varied paintings of the 1940s and early

1950s are notable for their clear, intense, unpredictable color and for their intuitive, engaging structure.

The color is so rowdy, the structure so quirky, in fact, that at first acquaintance, it seems easy to

understand why Kaldis was labeled a naif. But it soon becomes apparent that there is nothing unwilled or

uninformed about these pictures. Kaldis simplifies his drawing and pares down his shapes not out of lack

of ability, but out of a desire to "discard the unessentials," as he put it. He focuses not on what can be

seen, but on what imprints itself on the memory: the curved armchair back or the arc-ing radio cord that

play such important roles in Red Cross Worker, 1945, along with such delights as a mounted animal

head, a cherished portrait, and a couple of playing cards. The picture is startling for its apparent

"artlessness", but the longer we spend with Red Cross Worker, the more we realize that Kaldis's "child-

like" drawing is anything but and that its "haphazard" composition is, in fact, rock solid; everything is

held in a tense, dynamic balance, as though caught in a force-field between the centralized figure,

collapsed in the engagingly angled chair, and the edges of the canvas. The wrenchings and distortions of

recollection? Yes, but also the uninhibited improvisation licensed by modernist precedents.

Matisse's disarmingly simple Vence interiors of the early 1940s are part of the ancestry of Red

Cross Worker, just as his Fauvist still lifes and economical figures are part of the ancestry of all of

Kaldis's early efforts; witness pictures such as Tunisian Still Life, 1939, or any of the portraits of the

following decade. The example of Milton Avery -- who also learned a great deal from Matisse and was

exhibiting regularly in New York from the late 1930s throughout the 1940s -- was probably helpful, as

well. Kaldis's "naive" paintings soon reveal themselves as the work of sophisticated artist, an avid

museum goer and a keen studio visitor, someone thoroughly familiar with modernist innovations and

fully in command of his materials, who is striving to make images as intense as his feelings. Which is

not to discount the sheer willfulness of these early works, the combination of exuberance and insistence

that, by all accounts, was characteristic of the man himself.

It's worth remembering that about the time that the larger-than-life individual with the flowing

scarves and the ungovernable mane was painting these raffish, engaging images, he was also presenting a

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series of illustrated lectures -- twelve of them between 1944 and 1950 -- entitled the Key to Modern Art.

Kaldis described the talks as tracing "the origin and development of modern art" and "the political,

economic, and philosophic conceptions that contributed and so often determined each plastic

period...from prehistoric times up to our epoch." It's worth remembering, too, that the lantern slide

projector used during these discourses was operated by Kaldis's friend Bill de Kooning. Naiveté has

nothing to do with it.

Karen Wilkin

New York, October 2001