C O NTE NTS
1 On Animals in My Art by Irving Kriesberg
2 A Painter’s Life by Adam Zucker
6 Imagination’s Menagerie by Michael McNay
17 Selected Works 18 Guada l a j ara Mu j er 19 Abraham and Isa a c 20 Ruth w i th Ivy 21 The Cave 22 Trumpe ts 24 Li t t l e B irds in B lue F i e ld 25 Study For The Gre a t B ird 26 Ma l co lm Quadriptych 28 Martha ’s Danc ers 30 Ghosts [front pane ls] 32 Ghosts [re ar pane ls] 34 Sky B irds 35 S ing Me Proxy 36 Hard and Sof t St eps 38 Tur t l e Fri eze 40 Li t t l e Ra inbow 42 How Many M irrors 43 The Runn ing Pa ir 44 Monk ey Strider 45 Med i t errane an Monk ey 46 We t Le aves Taberna c le (Large Vers ion) 47 Morn ing Dre am 48 C lose Quart ers 49 Sma l l Mason 50 Down from the Mount a in 51 Tavern Ape 52 Caut ion 53 Spe c t a tor 54 The Subt errane an Passage
55 At the Tab l e 56 Dropp ing I 57 Dogf i e ld I 58 Sparrows Tha t F a l l 59 Hey Hey 60 Quadriptych 62 Tumb l ing 63 Danc e of the Beg inn ing 64 Ma t erna l Images 65 Man and Ow l 66 Tri ad I 67 Departure 68 G l anc es 69 C l ari ty 70 Ape and G irl (w i th co lors) 71 Med i t errane an and Ba l t i c 72 Wh i l e We Wa t ch 73 Dark Tri ad 74 Te am 75 Tash i Dev i l 76 Te a ch ing 77 Se l f-Dev i l 78 C loser 79 F ina l Danc e 80 At t a ched 81 Impudenc e 82 New Sky 83 Dorm i t ion w i th Wa l k ing B irds
Unless noted otherwise all photography by Paul Takeuchi, www.paultakeuchi.com.
Works identifi ed by exhibited atLongview Museum of Fine Arts,
January 14 – February 25, 2012,Adam Zucker, curator.
First published in the United States in 2012by Estate of Irving Kriesberg.
www.irvingkriesberg.com
Designed by forbes&butler visual communications.Printed by Hudson Printing & Graphic Design.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.
Cover: Mediterranean Monkey, 1975Oil on canvas, 29” x 39”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
ISBN 978-0-615-57452-3
Printed & bound in the United States of America. Partial view of Little Birds in Blue Field, 1951Tempera on masonite, 15” × 17”
Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Irving Kriesberg, 1959Photograph by Lilo Raymond.
I R V I N G K R I E S B E R GA NIM A L NA R R ATI V E S
1
ON A N I M A L S I N M Y A RTby I r v ing K r ie sberg
Down from the Mountain, 1980Oil on canvas, 68” × 43”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
All I can say positively on this ma tter is tha t these are
the images tha t well up in my eyes as soon as the brush
hits the canvas.
We know a t once tha t these are not animals in the
biological sense nor are they humans either. They are not
animals ac ting as humans nor humans masquerading
as animals. They exist outside of such ca tegories. We
recognize tha t they confront, they converse , they confer.
Ye t we do not know their purpose . Such unanswered
questions crea te tensions - a psychic tension so tha t
the elements of painting , color, mass, direc tion, interval
all become charged . The arena is an abstrac t psychic
fi eld; the particulars of the drama ma tter less. Ac ting
within tha t psychic fi eld , I see no distinc tion be tween
the image of an owl and a white painted mass having
a certain weight, direc tion and role within the canvas.
Traditional thea ter uses masks to establish the
universality of the charac ters regardless of the
particular performance - mother, daughter, villain. The
game of chess establishes rules which govern the fi xed
obliga tions and privileges of the Queen, the Pawns,
e tc . My few animals play various roles in my art. The
meaning depends not on the species portrayed but on
the a ttitude of the painter.
C an we ask wha t a toma to means? In the hands of
Richard Diebenkorn, who adop ts a hedonistic stance ,
the freshly cut toma toes, their succulent juices sparkling
in the sunlight, embody the general experience of
wholesomeness and pleasure . In the hands of the
painter Soutine , a still life of toma toes invokes the idea
of denigra ted masses, their huddling rendered as stabs
of red and dirt.
Aesop’s animals are sly, doltish or wise; they inhabit
the human world . I feel closer to Herriman’s Krazy
Ka t. In his little panels he projec ts perfec tly the dear
foolishness of life .
Irving Kriesberg, 2006Photograph by Matthias Kriesberg
2 3
As a child in Chicago , Irving Kriesberg crea ted drawing
books fi lled with images of museum taxidermy he
encountered a t the Field Museum of Na tural History. This
early experience of biological rendering , along with his
admira tion of the innocent playfulness, poe tic dialogue
and surrealist environments in the comic strip Krazy
Ka t by G eorge Herriman (1880 – 1944), made a lasting
impression on Kriesberg .
For over sixty years Kriesberg tapped into subconscious
memory to engage his own animal imagery, inviting
viewers to observe tha t which, as he described it, “wells
up behind my eyes” . His work blurred the line be tween
abstrac tion and representa tion during a time when many
artists had chosen comple te abstrac tion as a means
to a more spiritual and absolute style . Kriesberg used
the fi gure prolifi cally, crea ting his mystical, dreamlike
environments out of a process he defi ned as the
spontaneous applica tion of paint. His animal fi gura tions
are most accura tely interpre ted abstrac tly; certainly, he
stead fastly maintained , they had no allegorical intent. In
Kriesberg’s view, the emotional impac t of his work relies
above all else on the a ttitude of the painter. He combined
his individual and shared worldly experiences with a
fantastical imagina tion.
Kriesberg’s travels around the world made him aware
of ancient spiritual cultures and modern, non-Western
civiliza tions. A fter gradua ting from the Art Institute in
Chicago , Kriesberg traveled to Mexico City in 1941. His
years in Mexico exposed him to expressive forms of art
being made “for the people , by the people” . The emotive ,
violent murals of Jose Clemente Orozco and David
Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as the political printmaking by
the Taller de Gráfi ca Popular (TG P), an infl uential print
workshop , would be important elements of Kriesberg’s
early Figura tive Expressionist work . C ombining emotive
violence with spiritual mysticism from the Old Testament,
Kriesberg began to paint poignant fi gura tions. It was also
in Mexico tha t Kriesberg fi rst started to work with clay to
A PA I N T E R’S L I FEby Adam Zucker
crea te sculp tures tha t recalled ancient cultural relics of
the past, a prac tice he periodically re turned to over the
next 50 years.
Kriesberg returned to America and located in New York
City in 1945. Soon after, he came to the attention of
sculptor Jacques Lipchitz , who introduced Kriesberg to
his art dealer, Curt Valentin, the owner of a prominent
uptown gallery, and who not long after became
Kriesberg’s fi rst dealer. Lipchitz also showed Kriesberg’s
paintings to Dorothy Miller, who was the fi rst trained
curator at The Museum of Modern Art. Miller included
Kriesberg in a 1951 ‘New Talent’ exhibition at The
Museum of Modern Art, and again in 1957. His big
break came when Miller included him in the landmark
1952 exhibition 15 Americans, the show that signifi cantly
substantiated the careers of abstract painters Jackson
Pollock, William Baziotes, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and
Bradley Walker Tomlin.
Alongside the many seminal Abstract Expressionists
shown in this exhibition, Kriesberg was the only Figurative
Expressionist to be represented . In 1955 Kriesberg had
his New York City solo debut at the Curt Valentin Gallery.
But by then Valentin had died , and when the gallery
dissolved in 1954 Kriesberg was picked up by Duveen
Graham Gallery in New York, later Graham Modern and
the forerunner of the current Graham Gallery in New York.
Over the next 50 years,
Kriesberg created his
paintings, ceramics
and sculptures in an
idiosyncratic style that
continuously evolved
over the decades, with
images of animals,
yearning angels, and
humanoid fi gures
predominating. His
output ranged from
innovative two-sided multi-panel “changeable” paintings
to banners for some of the large peace demonstrations
held in New York during the 1980's.
During various periods in his life from his 40s until well
into his 60s, Kriesberg lived and worked in India and
Japan, and spent time studying at the Buddhist-inspired
Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Although his work
sometimes refl ected imagery from where he worked, he
often described his painting style as one that developed
not so much from outside sources as from within.
Bulletin board in studio, 2009
Palette in Kriesberg studio, 2009
4 5
“! e current increase of interest in animals on the part of society
and scholars is not due to a sudden rise in the feel-good sentiment
felt toward our fellow creatures. It is because there is a growing
awareness that in animals we see variegated expressions of our
own faculties, impulses and social organization which can help
us understand fundamental aspects of our own nature.”
So the fi gures, whether animal, human or humanoid have
a painterly task. And thus, while certain creatures reoccur
in different paintings, they often exhibit different emotions
or roles. Sometimes they are fi gures of worship , friends or
guardians; at other times they are predatory or burlesque .
As is the case in Dog" eld I (p . 57) from 1988, fi gures seem
to have multiple roles within the same painting. They can
be menacing but also benign, as in the white owl that
hovers over the migrating fi gurations in the painting. The
owl initially appears to be guarding them from evil, but the
look on its face also suggests it might be guiding them
towards malevolence . In the 1984 painting Impudence (p .
81), the white owl again exhibits confl icting personalities.
It is often presented as an angel, but many times the owl
engages in conspiratorial actions with a red devilish fi gure .
If Kriesberg made any admission of meaning within his art,
it was that “Dream-like images have mystical intent.” The
abundant and individual themes throughout his work
reveal a spiritual yearning and sublimity in a style that is at
one with Kriesberg’s humanistic expressionism.
Irving Kriesberg’s paintings are held in the permanent
collection of over 60 American art museums, including
The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum
of American Art, The Corcoran Gallery, The Brooklyn
Museum, The Detroit Museum of Art, The Kresge Art
Museum, the National Museum of American Art, The
Butler Institute of American Art, The Birmingham Museum
of Art, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, The
Dayton Art Institute , The Allentown Art Museum, The
Boca Raton Museum of Art, The Rose Art Museum, The
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, The Scottsdale
MO C A , The Crocker Art Museum, and many others.
Adam Zucker is an artist, art historian and curator based
in New York City.
Art historian George Nelson Preston said of Kriesberg:
“He has never consciously sought a counter aesthetic through
purely painterly means. He has been a leader in innovation
through eccentricity of composition and exposition of an
internal mental dialect of polarities. ! e means by which this
has been carried out are largely through the presentational
motifs of proscenium, setting, and encounter.”
Kriesberg consistently maintained that his concerns were
painterly and abstract. His fi gures were meant to project
their own identities and invite the viewer to partake in
a world populated by a dramatic labyrinth of colorful
characters. His fi gurations were intended , Kriesberg
asserted , to touch the observer deep in the subconscious
mind , evoking a sense of the primeval, and tapping a
collective sense of an archetypal visual language that is
inherent in the nature of humanity.
The white owl, the blue monkey, the Satan fi gure , sheep ,
frogs and snakes: animals were the medium for the
greater part of his work, and their relationship to humans
(or humanoids) is mysterious. They are not animals in any
literal sense . Their “meaning” derives from the thoughts
of the painter rather than from the species depicted .
On one level, the animals served as pictorial opportunities
to explore line , shape , color and space . They are
focal points on the canvas, vehicles for exploring the
possibilities of two-dimensional representation.
On the other hand , Kriesberg never denied an implied
spirituality in the fi guration. These spiritual infl uences
are not limited to one source , but derive from Judaism,
Eastern Philosophy and his interest in ancient civilizations.
All of these cultures have used animals in their rituals
and folklore to explore the relationship with the universe .
When, in 1965, Kriesberg embarked by freighter for India ,
he went, as he has said , in order to immerse himself in
that tradition which acknowledges that animals have
souls no less than humans. In the fragment of an essay
he was writing at the end of his life on the topic of animals
in his work, he explained:
Dogfi eld I, 1988Oil on canvas, 63” × 64”
Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Impudence, 1984Oil on canvas, 50” × 74”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
6 7
Although Irving Kriesberg was one of the 15 Americans
who took part in the celebrated exhibition of that name , he
was in a sense an outsider. The exhibit was organized for
the Museum of Modern Art in New York by its renowned
curator, Dorothy Miller, and subsequently dispatched
to several European venues to spread the word of the
breakout by the New York school. Kriesberg’s co-exhibitors
included William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and
Jackson Pollock; apart from Pollock, none of them yet a
household name any more than Kriesberg. The year was
1952, and Europe was still in shock from the war, looking
through the ruins to see what had survived .
Abstraction, at that point, was so ill-defi ned and
misunderstood that Kriesberg must have appeared in
Europe as not much different from the group of abstract
expressionists with whom he shared wall space . Except
for this: The two paintings he showed , Yellow Sheep and
Birds Alighting (one of a 1951 bird series from which
another, Little Birds in Blue Field, is part of the Longview
Museum of Fine Arts exhibition), suggested a painter
working from nature , rather than from within. The truth,
however, is more complex than that.
Miller’s brief catalogue foreword , aimed purely at sorting
the painters into understandable categories, would
seem blindingly obvious to an audience today. But in
those confused times when, to Europeans, American art
probably meant something between Grandma Moses
and the New Deal’s Federal Art Project, her admirably
blunt exposition was surely useful:
“In the work of certain artists in Fifteen Americans – [Edwin]
Dickinson, [Herman] Rose, [Herbert] Katzman – experience
I M AGI N AT ION’S M E N AGE R I Eby Michae l McNay
and its expression are related to the world the artist sees about
him. Others – Baziotes, [Frederick] Kiesler, [Herbert] Ferber,
and Pollock in some of his latest pictures – even when dealing
primarily with abstract forms, evoke vivid associations
with the objective world. ! e work of [Joseph] Glasco and
of Kriesberg seems to fall between these two groups. Rothko,
Still, much of Pollock, [Bradley Walker] Tomlin, [Edward]
Corbett, [Richard] Lippold, and [! omas] Wilfred fall
within the category usually called abstract, which, as many
competent observers have remarked, is the dominant trend in
mid-century American painting.”
Miller left the artists to write introductory notes to their
own work, and Kriesberg put in a nutshell the view of art
to which he was to subscribe throughout his long life ,
and its centuries-old historical context. In part, it reads:
“! e medieval man saw his icon simply as it was. Of course
it symbolized something else, but his Madonna had little
optical reference to a speci" c woman. ! e Renaissance man
saw his Madonna as a woman: what the artist painted blue
was not only a symbol, it was the depiction of a robe, a real
garment a real person might wear. Together the artist and the
observer altered the meaning of the colored panel: from being
a symbolic object it became also a depiction of natural objects.
! e optical means employed were arbitrary conventions but
they gave to painting an unsurpassed richness and scope. We
are still within this tradition. We admire medieval art and
borrow from it, but we still seek to depict natural objects with
all the richness and vitality we perceive in them. If a # at
surface can show the depth and space of nature, then a single
" xed surface can show the change and motion of nature. I see
that nature is motion and change and that is what I paint.
It is illogical, but then art is illogical. How can patches of
color transmit to one man the passions felt by another? It is
impossible. It is utterly marvelous.”
Irving Kriesberg was born in Chicago in 1919, thus
younger than the abstract expressionists in 15 Americans:
Rothko was born in 1903, Still in 1904, Baziotes and
Pollock in 1912. Like them, he looked closely at European
painting but, unlike Pollock in particular, felt no need to
measure himself against the great European modernists.
In fact, Kriesberg’s fi rst port of call in 1941 after Chicago
was Mexico City, where he lived for the next three
years. There he attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes
Plásticas, was deeply impressed by the ambition of the
Mexican muralists – particularly the volcanic classicism of
Orozco – and in 1943 himself painted murals in a Ministry
Yellow Sheep, 1951Tempera on panel, 54” × 48”Collection Rose Museum, Brandeis University
8 9
masculine assertiveness. (Ten years later he incorporated
the portrait subject’s poem Sing Me Proxy (p . 35) into a
more characteristic painting: a lyrical, raunchy diagram of
the joyously carnal life , organized in panels bursting with
incident and color like a comic book.)
In fact, Kriesberg fl ew beneath the radar partly by choice .
His experience away from the rat race while young had
nourished him into an early maturity, and forever after he
pursued neither fame nor the favor of the media as an
adjunct of his art. Though the organization of his paintings
changed and he developed a personal iconography,
Kriesberg’s approach to the application of pigment,
scrubbed and scribbled on, never changed from the time
he returned to the United States in 1944 until his death
in 2009. It was an abstractionist’s approach to subject
matter that might pass as fi gurative , but throughout his
life Kriesberg took the line that abstraction and fi guration
were , effectively, the same thing: shapes on a canvas,
working as shapes and colours or not at all.
The arrival of pop art in the '60s illuminated a sense that
abstract expressionism, despite the massive injection
of inspirational self confi dence it had brought to the art
scene (and not just in the United States), had been the
last twitch of European romanticism mediated through
the presence in wartime America of those European
surrealists who had fl ed from France to New York. But
Kriesberg’s work was unaffected; it simply proliferated in
its fecundity. Rothko possibly and Pollock certainly had
run out of juice before their early deaths; to Kriesberg
Inspiration was no more a problem than perspiration. He
was a natural with the native certainty to realize that the
big bang always ends in a whimper.
Some thirty years ago, as recounted by his daughter Nell,
he spoke about the abstract-fi gurative schism:
“It really isn’t that important what the subject matter is; the
point is what is happening on the canvas. So looking here, it’s
not so much that this is a wing and that a hand - it’s that if I
do it this way [now gesturing to a corner where the " gures were
intermingled] then something very interesting starts to happen
in that corner of the canvas. And this green over here, it’s not
that important if it’s part of a face or a hand - it’s what’s going
on with the green, and then what happens to the green when it’s
near the yellow. What’s happening on the canvas, to the space,
that’s the real thing.”
Yet in an essay written in the year of his death he suggests
obliquely that there is also a “literary” meaning to his
paintings: “Traditional theater uses masks to establish the
of Agriculture exposition hall for an agricultural fair. At the
same time he began developing religious imagery, at that
stage Judeo-Christian. A moving interpretation from 1945
of the incipient tragedy of Abraham and Isaac (p . 19) depicts
father and son clinging together in a trinity of despair,
as Abraham holds a huge knife to Isaac’s back. Had he
never visited any of the great temple sites and pyramids,
but looked only at the best collection in the world of pre-
Columbian sculpture and pottery at the National Museum
of Anthropology in Mexico City, he would nonetheless
have absorbed the biggest lesson for a modern artist:
Even if the intended function and meaning of a work of art
has disappeared beneath the drifting sands of history, its
intrinsic power as image lives on.
His fi gurative work in Mexico and in the immediate
years afterward was the sign of an emerging major
talent. Portraits and subject pictures, such as the 1942
Guadalajara Mujer (p . 18), show not just the infl uence
of the Mexican muralists and pre-Columbian art, but
some of the majestic simplifi cations of Picasso derived
from similar sources – although in Picasso’s case these
were largely Spanish and African, rather than Mexican.
Suggestions of Picasso recur, by happenstance or
intention, frequently in Kriesberg’s work. What was
happening on the other side of the Atlantic would always
be part of his mental baggage , although he never set foot
in Europe until 1966.
When Kriesberg returned to the United States in 1944,
it was to New York. The abstract expressionists were
entering into their kingdom. Their champion, Clement
Greenberg, reviewing in November of that year Robert
Motherwell’s fi rst solo exhibition, observed , “the future of
American painting depends on what he , Baziotes, Pollock,
and only a comparatively few others do from now on.”
Kriesberg fell decidedly outside the category of painters
blessed by Greenberg. Even in the 1950's, having
already begun to develop his later manner, he was still
fully capable of reverting to outright fi guration when
it suited him, as in a marvelously tender portrait of his
fi rst wife , Ruth Miller (p . 20), depicted sitting before a
pot of ivy standing on a little table , the space behind
her a lovely mauve , her dress sky blue , her face , hair
and hands picking up refl ections of blue and green –
a painting of almost feminine sensitivity from a man
who was to produce a body of work remarkable for its
Ruth with Ivy, 1954Oil on canvas, 38” × 20”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Sing Me Proxy, 1964Acrylic on paper, 29” × 23”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Guadalajara Mujer, 1942Oil on canvas, 10” × 8”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Abraham and Isaac, 1945Oil on canvas, 32” × 21”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
10 11
shows fl uttering white shapes against a pale blue ground .
A woman in yellow plucks a white fl ower; a monolithic
head peering in from the edge of the painting observes
her steadily. The pigment is thinly laid on, weightless. It’s
a kind of pale blue dream in which colors relate to nothing
in real life but create their own environment, a different
reality from the one we know.
During a 20-year stretch from the mid '60s to the mid
'80s Kriesberg worked periodically in India and Japan,
for his purposes interrelated cultures. Buddhists hold
that animal life and suffering is as profound as man’s,
and Hindus believe that cows are sacred and accordingly
must be allowed the freedom of the streets. The latter
also treat animal gods and avatars as a fact of daily life:
Hanuman the Hindu monkey god , Ganesh the elephant-
headed god of good fortune , Nandi the guardian bull,
Narasimha the lion-headed man god – their pervading
images are often painted on trucks or suspended from
the rearview mirrors of taxis.
Little Rainbow, painted in 1970 (p . 40) merges a number
of Kriesberg’s themes. It is a triptych, an early example
of his polyptychs (triptychs and quadriptychs). That no
single panel is more important than any other – a crucial
distinction from classical religious polyptychs – suggests
that the format is as likely to have been borrowed from
the world of narrative comics as from Medieval or
Renaissance art.
Quite apart from its striking beauty as a richly painted
design, Little Rainbow displays a number of Kriesberg
characteristics. Like many modern painters, but
particularly Picasso, Kriesberg borrowed from other
artists – not in direct emulation, but in awareness of
their potential, and a willingness to adapt for his own
purposes a collage of infl uences. The left-hand panel
of Little Rainbow shows a group of purposeful fi gures
marching across an arch (echoing the shape of the
rainbow in the third panel). They seem a clear reference
to Marcel Duchamp’s modernist classic , Nude Descending
a Staircase, with its fi gure multiplied to suggest movement,
and which Kriesberg may have seen in the original at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Beneath the arch are a man
and monkey in discussion (another recurring theme),
leaning towards each other to form a rough circle within a
rough circle . In the central panel the fi gures have resolved
themselves into one man; still striding, he passes through
a complex architectural structure of brilliant vermilion
with blue passages tapering to a point that might be
universality of the characters regardless of the particular
performance – mother, daughter, villain... My few animals
play various roles in my art. The meaning depends not on
the species portrayed but on the attitude of the painter.”
The two statements are not contradictory. Color might
be thought of as the essence of Kriesberg’s work, but
the spatial and linear treatment of animals and human
beings animates the surface . The color recalls Matisse ,
but the disposition of color from Matisse to Kriesberg is
quite different: Matisse , typically, uses color to create an
Elysian calm, but Kriesberg frequently uses his areas of
hot color to play a part equal to the drawing in intensifying
the picture surface – see the broad strips of orange
beach and sky, and the vermilion clouds refl ected in the
turquoise water, in the 1975 Mediterranean Monkey (p . 45).
Paintings featuring animals form the largest single portion
of his output. Monkeys and owls predominate as principal
characters, with a supporting cast principally of birds,
snakes, dogs and frogs – some of them with human
heads. Kriesberg never differentiated much between
human and animal. His animals, he said , were outside
such categorizations. As a child , Kriesberg had loved
George Herriman’s immortal Krazy Kat comic strip with
its setting in the moonscape of Monument Valley (long
before John Ford adopted it as a setting for his Westerns).
The landscape was clearly not a prime infl uence , but
Herriman’s animals, portraying what Kriesberg described
as “the sweet foolishness of life”, remained in the artist’s
mind not for its unhinged comedy, but as an expression of
the lightness of being. The word animal, after all, derives
ultimately from the Latin anima (breath or spirit), and in
Kriesberg’s theatre the animals are theatrical masks for
his human beings and their emotions. C ertainly they meet
human beings on equal terms.
The relatively late (1992)
Sparrows that Fall (p . 58)
is precisely about the
lightness of being.
Hamlet’s beautiful line ,
“There is a special
providence in the fall of
a sparrow”, may bear
upon this, or perhaps
Kriesberg was thinking
of the Gospel according
to St. Matthew: “Are not
two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall
not fall on the ground without your Father.” The painting
Mediterranean Monkey, 1975Oil on canvas, 29” × 39”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Sparrows that Fall, 1992Oil on canvas, 70” × 50”
Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Little Rainbow, 1970Oil on panel, 24.3” × 54”Panels attached in single frameEstate of Irving Kriesberg
12 13
the ava tar of the painter; the face – ragged incisors
in a spreading gash of a scarle t and orange mouth,
squashed nose , tufts of hair, horns, eyes of orange ,
green, and purple – clearly a grotesque take on a self-
portrait, the pugnacious, pugilistic face tha t shows in
photographs of the old Kriesberg . Similarly, in the 1990
virtuoso line drawing , Ape and Girl (p . 70), the ape might
be Kriesberg and the nude female his model, just as in
some of Picasso’s la te e tchings an artist ape sits a t an
easel painting the same subjec t.
Leaving aside Self-Devil,
the linear paintings are a
sub-ca tegory within a
series of a genre tha t, in
18th century European
court and aristocra tic
circles, were known as
conversa tion pieces.
Thus with Mediterranean and Baltic (p . 71) it might be
said tha t the hoary old sea green head represents the
Mediterranean, and the head spitting fi re the Baltic .
In Clarity (p . 69), ske tched in blue with just a touch
of yellow, a bearded old philosopher converses with
an owl. But projec ting charac ter onto these fi gments
underscores again the futility of the exercise . The
power of each image stands for itself. Painting is its
own meaning .
In 2003, his ninth decade , Kriesberg painted Dormition
With Walking Birds (p . 83). In the Christian Orthodox
church dormition denotes the dea th of the Virgin;
Buddhists re fer to the dormition of G autama Buddha’s
mother, Maya . The fi gure stre tched out on the ground
of Kriesberg’s Dormition is neither Mary nor Maya but
a skele ton, or maybe the x-ray of a body, possibly
Kriesberg’s itself. From neck to navel the body is
unzipped to show a fresh bouque t of fl owers instead
of entrails – or the nearest thing in terms of abstrac t
blotches of paint. Around this area of green serenity
a fl ock of walking birds assemble . The perspec tive is
as fl a t as a thirteenth-century landscape . An owl-like ,
helme t-headed angel wa tches over him . A pack of
dogs, one human-headed , pay their doggy respec ts. A
blue snake unfurls peace fully beside him . A plaque with
the face of a lion, perhaps standing in for the powerfully
symbolical Buddhist lion column of Sarna th in India ,
stands a t the apex of the composition. A t the top is the
edge of the world with “the old star-ea ten blanke t of the
sky” beyond , as though the world depic ted is merely a
painted panel.
stained glass windows. Ahead of him, in the right-hand
panel, is a long-legged white hound with a human head
leading the group; the rainbow divides passages of grey
and green pigment, and beneath it the dog emerges into
a glorious, affi rmative suffusion of blue .
Also blue , a screaming bird – differentiated from the
background blue by a touch more white in the pigment,
and graphically outlined with a few swiftly drawn black
lines – fl ashes across the sky: a reference , perhaps, to the
late Braque masterpieces depicting a huge bird hurtling
through an artist’s studio, fracturing the stasis. If Braque’s
mid-century paintings are a demonstration that simulated
movement can exist in the cubist-inspired space of his
breakthrough years decades earlier, arguably Kriesberg’s
Rainbow triptych symbolizes the emergence of painting
from European modes into the new American dawn.
But once spelt out, the whole exercise of fi nding a
“meaning” instantly seems crass. Even if that was in
Kriesberg’s mind semi-intuitively, it still matters not a
jot to us, the outsiders looking in. In both Braque and
Kriesberg, the bird stands for fl ux, for transformation, for
psychic disturbance . Yet whatever the undercurrents,
and notwithstanding the psychic tensions that Kriesberg
mentions in relation to his work in general, the thrust of
the triptych’s meaning lies at bottom in its defi nition of
space and movement and the brilliant suggestiveness
of the fully orchestrated chords of color. Nothing more ,
nothing less. And it is enough.
Whatever Little Rainbow portends, it certainly isn’t a
future of abstract expressionism. Kriesberg was as
much a designer as he was a brilliant draftsman and
colorist. The absurdist Monkey Strider (p . 44) from 1973
is a daring exposition of almost rigid design. ! e Running
Pair (p . 43) from 1971 is as taut as a commercial logo,
yet wonderfully realized in terms of color, animation, and
the characterization of two immensely fl exible frogs.
(Animated fi lm was, in fact, a Kriesberg sideline – but
that’s another story.)
The scribbled bird of Little
Rainbow, on the other hand,
is a precursor to a series of
swiftly knocked-in outline
paintings he began to produce
regularly starting in the 1970's,
of which Self-Devil (1984)
(p. 77), is typical. The devil
is, as the title suggests,
Monkey Strider, 1973Oil on canvas, 36” × 46”Longview Museum of Fine ArtsPhotograph byTammy Cromer-Campbell
The Running Pair, 1971Oil on canvas, 31” × 24”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Self-Devil, 1984Pastel on paper, 28” × 22”
Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Ape and Girl, 1990Monogravure, 19” × 25”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Mediterranean and Baltic,1990, Monogravure, 16” × 20”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Clarity, 1990Monogravure, 19” × 24”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
14
In 1964, Clement Greenberg announced that he had
switched his imprimatur from the Abstract Expressionists
to a group of painters including Kenneth Noland , Helen
Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Jules Olitski, decorators
of surfaces as smooth as silk and fl at as an ironing
board . In his catalogue essay for an exhibition of their
work in Los Angeles, he dubbed their work Post-Painterly
Abstraction, and added that Abstract Expressionism had
“turned into a school, then into a manner, and fi nally into
a set of mannerisms.”
Kriesberg had by then cut free of the talk and the labelling.
His world certainly had something in common with the
aspirations of his contemporaries, particularly the “all
overness”, as the critics named the practice of painting
with equal stress on every single brush stroke , seeking a
unity of surface akin to a Persian carpet. But Kriesberg
had no time for the hardening of the arteries involved in
the isms. He was set on a constant search, of fl at surface
as well as illusion, and of the spaces in the mind that
transcended the cerebral.
Michael McNay is a freelance author and journalist, and a
former arts editor at ! e Guardian in London.
Dormition with Walking Birds, 1984Oil on canvas, 50” × 74”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Self Portrait, 1976Oil on canvas, 28” × 20”
Estate of Irving Kriesberg
17
I R V I N G K R I E S B E R GSELECTED WOR K S
Irving Kriesberg, 1990Photograph courtesy of theEstate of Irving Kriesberg.
18 19
Guadalajara Mujer, 1942Oil on canvas, 10” × 8”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Abraham and Isaac, 1945Oil on canvas, 32” × 21”
Estate of Irving Kriesberg
20 21
Ruth with Ivy, 1954Oil on canvas, 38” × 20”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
The Cave, 1953Oil on canvas, 52” × 42”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
24 25
Little Birds in Blue Field, 1951Tempera on masonite, 15” × 17”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Study for the Great Bird, 1954Oil on canvas, 28” × 23”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
28 29
Martha’s Dancers – Front, 1963Oil on canvas (movable panels), 65” × 77”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Martha’s Dancers – Rear, 1963Oil on canvas (movable panels), 65” × 77”
Estate of Irving Kriesberg
30 31
Ghosts [front panels], 1967Oil on canvas,
(mounted movable panels), 64” × 85”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
32 33
Ghosts [rear panels], 1967Oil on canvas,
(mounted movable panels), 64” × 85”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
34 35
Sky Birds, 1978Pastel on paper, 22” × 29”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Sing Me Proxy, 1964 Poem by Ruth Miller
Acrylic on paper, 29” × 23”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
36 37
Hard and Soft Steps, 1960Oil on canvas , attached panels, each 37.3” × 65”
Estate of Irving Kriesberg
40 41
Little Rainbow, 1970Oil on canvas, 24.3” × 54”Panels attached in single frameEstate of Irving Kriesberg
42 43
The Running Pair, 1971Oil on canvas, 31” × 24”Estate of Irving KriesbergHow Many Mirrors, 1966
Acrylic on canvas, 31” × 25”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
44 45
Monkey Strider, 1973Oil on canvas, 36” × 46”Longview Museum of Fine ArtsPhotograph by Tammy Cromer-Campbell
Mediterranean Monkey, 1975Oil on canvas, 29” × 39”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
46 47
Morning Dream, 1973Oil on canvas, 42” × 39”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Wet Leaves Tabernacle (Large Version), 1978Oil on canvas, 43” × 54”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
48 49
Close Quarters, 1974Oil on canvas, 44” × 36”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Small Mason, 1976Oil on canvas, 47” × 36”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
50 51
Tavern Ape, 1979Pastel on paper, 29” × 22”
Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Down from the Mountain, 1980Oil on canvas, 68” × 43”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
52 53
Spectator, 1983Oil on canvas, 66” × 54”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Caution, 1981Oil on canvas, 74” × 67”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
54 55
The Subterranean Passage, 1966Acrylic on paper on board, 30.5” × 20”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
At the Table, 1982Pastel on paper, 29” × 22”
Estate of Irving Kriesberg
56 57
Dogfi eld I, 1988Oil on canvas, 63” × 64”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Dropping I, 1991Oil on canvas, 80” × 59”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
58 59
Sparrows That Fall, 1992Oil on canvas, 70” × 50”Estate of Irving Kriesberg Hey Hey, 1998
Oil on canvas, 60” × 50”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
62 63
Tumbling, 1998Oil on canvas, 70” × 58”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Dance of the Beginning, 1984Oil on canvas, 58” × 75”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
64 65
Maternal Images 1991Oil on canvas, 80” × 66”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Man and Owl, 1989Oil on canvas, 68” × 56”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
66 67
Departure, 1995Oil on canvas, 44” × 30”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Triad I, 1992Oil on canvas, 79” × 71”Longview Museum of Fine Arts
68 69
Glances, 1990Monogravure, 13” × 17”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Clarity, 1990Monogravure, 19” × 24”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
70 71
Ape and Girl (with colors), 1990Monogravure, 19” × 25”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Mediterranean and Baltic, 1990Monogravure, 16” × 20”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
72 73
While We Watch, 1986Oil on canvas, 67” × 77”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Dark Triad, 1987Oil on canvas, 58” × 58”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
74 75
Team, 1987Oil on canvas, 68” × 66”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Tashi Devil, 1981Oil on canvas, 70” × 80”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
76 77
Teaching, 1981Pastel on paper, 29” × 22”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Self-Devil 1984Pastel on paper, 28” × 22”
Estate of Irving Kriesberg
78 79
Closer, 2000Oil on canvas 80” × 65”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Final Dance, 2002Oil on canvas 68” × 45”
Estate of Irving Kriesberg
80 81
Attached, 2001Oil on canvas, 68” × 45”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
Impudence, 1984Oil on canvas, 50” × 74”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
82 83
Dormition with Walking Birds, 1984,Oil on canvas, 50” × 74”Estate of Irving Kriesberg
New Sky (1998)Oil on Canvas, 53” × 68”The Estate of Irving Kriesberg