Today we’d like to introduce you to John Himmelfarb.

Thanks for sharing your story with us John. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.

I decided I wanted to become an artist when I was a junior in college and began exhibiting my work in public in 1968. After college, I sublet some studio space in Pilsen on Halsted near 18th, then bought a building in 1971, on 19th and Peoria. I gradually developed a national following through exhibitions and travel, but mostly kept my studio in that area until 1991, when I bought an old department store building in Heart of Chicago. At first, most of my work was on paper, but gradually, painting became a bigger part of my work. I found a very good dealer to show my work in New York and had other galleries that showed my work in Chicago, Milwaukee, Omaha and sometimes other places.

In 2007, I was invited to go to the Kohler cast iron foundry as part of their Art in Industry program and learned I could work in metal. At that point, I started making sculpture as well as flat work. I started using the abstract image of a truck in much of my work, and after making some smaller truck sculptures, got the idea to use real trucks that drive with salvaged metal welded together to make the sculptures. I was inspired by the shapes and colors of the scrapper trucks that came by my studio every day.

Today, my clients are a mix of individual collectors, corporations, and museums. I don’t have any walk-in retail sales. Everything is done by appointment or online.

Has it been a smooth road?

Looking back, it looks like a steady progression, but in reality, it was often very difficult to keep the business going and also to keep making better work. The ups and downs of the economy hit artists very hard, as art is the first thing people stop buying when they are concerned about the financial situation, and it’s the last thing they resume buying after the economy recovers. My strategy has always been to keep a very low overhead, but even so, I’ve made some mistakes, like buying new equipment or hiring more help just before a downturn.

Juggling the studio along with marriage and raising kids has always been exciting, even if a challenge at times. When I began, I had no idea how much travel would be involved in this kind of work. I’ve even exhibited and worked abroad once in a while. I had a show in a museum in Korea in the 1990s, and last year I was invited to do some work in Venice, Italy.

Today, my work is in museum and private collections throughout the country and I’ve benefited from the long recovery we are in now.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with John Himmelfarb — tell our readers more, for example, what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.

I make things I want to make and then hope to find someone who wants to buy them. This is the opposite of the usual business model of finding what people want and then making it.

Sometimes, I’m asked to make something for a specific site. I made two 15′ by 20′ paintings for the airport in Boston, for instance, and also made a ceramic tile mural for the Pink Line stop at Kedzie. These kinds of projects are high pressure but rewarding.

I can’t say that I’m proud of my company, it’s just what I do and I’ve had help from so many people who have taught me about printmaking, welding, and many other techniques. But I’m pleased that my work is well accepted and that I am able to continue to learn how to use new methods, including computers, to make my work.

I have a very personal style, so generally, I think that the individuality of my work is what sets me apart from other artists.

[ link to online blog post ]

Chicago artist John Himmelfarb has been making art for nearly fifty years. His artworks have been exhibited throughout the world and collected by many prominent museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC. During most of his long, successful career, John has created paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures that have depicted subjects other than trucks. Yet, since 2003, artworks that feature an image of a truck have become his focus.

What he was working on from the late 1960s until 2003 cannot be easily categorized. John has always kept abreast of what other contemporary artists were doing and has regularly found inspiration in the art of others. But his knowledge and inspirations are much more personal than they are about keeping up with trends in the art world. Among the many recurring themes and ideas in or behind John’s work have been industrial and rural landscapes, human relationships, the mystery and beauty of written languages, and literary and musical references.

Taking a step back from that list of themes and ideas we can see that it encompasses a rather thorough list of what any of us might experience during our lives: places, people, and communication. While many artists focus their efforts on exploring a particular style or material or subject, John has focused his efforts on undertaking an expressive analysis of his personal experiences as they occur. Stated more simply, he waits for interesting things to happen; when they do, he digs into them by painting, drawing, printing, and sculpting as a way for him to find out why those things are interesting to him. In the process, he has created an enormous and dynamic body of work that is unified by the energy John puts into his art. Whatever topic or idea that inspires him to create, we as viewers can see clearly that he was excited by the entire process of making the artwork.

The ideas that have inspired John to make art are consistent in important ways. Our physical environment, relationships, and methods of communication define who we are and how we live. In John’s art, these things are presented with intensity and originality. Things that at first glance seem clear and recognizable turn out to represent nothing but visions from John’s imagination. Things that appear to be chaotic and abstract might conceal recognizable objects. This sense that differences can co-exist—the strange and the familiar, order and disorder—can be found throughout his work.

But trucks?

Why now and what took so long? Why would an artist whose work has been exhibited and collected by major art institutions around the world, shift gears into trucks?

Though John’s artworks are often responses to recent experiences, trucks as a subject in his work came about indirectly. The artistic response was not to trucks themselves, but to a painting by Jean Dubuffet he had seen during a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. The impact of the painting was so strong on John that when he first returned to his studio, he let his memory of the Dubuffet painting guide his work. In his retelling:

“l immediately went back to my studio, mixed up some blues and greens (as I recalled them from the Dubuffet), and laid down a patchwork of color swatches of no particular distinction. Over that I began to draw with a liquid black paint, using a thinner brush more suitable for drawing.

“As usual, I had no particular image in mind. I began on the right side with my industrial forms. The result looked like a crane, and I stopped far short of covering the entire plane with this pattern. It wasn’t enough, so I recommenced drawing beneath the boom of the crane. The truck that emerged delighted as much as it surprised me. I felt an immediate visceral connection.”

The “visceral connection” has continued since that moment in 2003. As John indicates in the above quote, the truck came about as an extension of the crane. The crane and other pieces of urban, industrial equipment had begun finding their way into work he had been creating for his Inland Romance series. This series featured bold, abstracted lines and shapes that were inspired by the roads, buildings, and industrial machinery of Chicago and the Midwest. The shapes of trucks, literally and figuratively, represented a move beyond urban architecture toward something more universally experienced. And by 2005, trucks made regular appearances in his paintings and drawings. The more he worked on them, the more he realized that they were capable of imparting a broader message than one of basic utility.

In 2007 John was invited to participate in a three-month residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center Arts/Industry program in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. This prestigious program gave him the chance to create sculptures for the first time in any serious, sustained period. He made a series of truck sculptures in wax and plasticene to create sand molds. These were used to create cast sculptures in iron, brass, and bronze, ranging widely in size.

While the subject of John’s works is trucks, it really represents a very specific kind of truck. Like many people, when he pictures trucks in his mind he goes back to his childhood memories of what a truck looks like. In his case that means work trucks that date from the late 1940s and early 1950s. John’s trucks are the tough, powerful vehicles that were in action as the country emerged from the Second World War and began a period of unprecedented growth. The type of truck that inspires him was designed for strength rather than beauty, a no-frills machine for doing a vital job.

This kind of honest dedication to its unsung purpose has often led John to assign titles to the artworks that reflect the value and dignity of the trucks. Dedication, Hero, Honor, Loyalty, and other similar titles tell us that we are looking at more than representations of trucks. We are looking at character. John has stated that the artworks in this series “are not about trucks but about us, our histories. skills and coping mechanisms, ambitions, and character.”

John’s interest in the truck’s sense of character and history led him to his next big step. In 2008 he acquired a 1949 International Harvester KB-I truck. Then, he crammed a host of steel barrels, tools, pipes, and other things, and covered all of the steel of the truck and its additions in bright red paint. John titled the painted sculpture Conversion, and he has since created additional drivable sculptures using work trucks from that time period, including Galatea, Remains, KB-3, and the work on display at the Sioux City Art Center, Penelope Awaiting Her Chamberlain.

Penelope Awaiting Her Chamberlain began life as a 1946 Chevrolet farm truck. After many welded additions to her cargo area and roof, she emerged as a drivable sculpture in 2013. “Penelope” in Greek mythology refers to wife of Odysseus, who remains faithful to her husband while he is away for twenty years fighting in the Trojan War. In John’s sculpture, rather than awaiting Odysseus, Penelope awaits Chamberlain, referring to artist John Chamberlain (1927- 2011). Chamberlain, who also grew up in Chicago, was best known for transforming old car parts into modernist sculptures.

Like the opposites contained within John’s earlier artworks, Penelope is familiar and strange, functional and artistic, industrial and whimsical and unexpectedly beautiful. It is John’s ability to give us something unexpected from something so common. The truck shifts from its purely industrial function to become a merging of forms and colors that have been determined both by its original manufacturing design and by John’s artistic design. In doing this, John celebrates our century-old appreciation of American trucks, as well as the equally long artistic tradition of converting factory-made materials into artworks.

To my constant amazement, people of all backgrounds and dispositions ask me, “Why trucks?” (Dogs never ask me this, as they share my excitement.) Does anyone ask the artist of still lives, “Why apples?”

For centuries, still lifes were held as a lesser form of art because they seemed to lack reference to intellectual concepts concerning religion, history, and philosophy. Only recently has the still life been accepted as a possible approach to high art. Just in time for my trucks.

An excerpt from my sister Susan’s recent remarks (in a discussion about whether a mystery story can be literature) is germane here: “As a child of two abstract painters, I learned from the air I breathed that content only becomes art when it is given meaning by the form an artist gives it, and that this is as true for literature and music as it is for visual arts.”

My primary driver as a visual artist is to create form that is exciting visually and that suggests content ripe for interpretation through association, metaphor, and implication. I am not concerned with illustrating what we see.

While I played with toy trucks as a child, and included some in childhood drawings, trucks were not major players in my childhood art. Growing up in the woods of DuPage County, west of Chicago, I did hear, more than a mile away and late at night, the sounds of the big rigs headed for the city with cattle and other products from the west. Once in a while, having trouble getting to sleep, I would slip out of the house and walk the distance to Alternate U.S. Highway 30 so that I could see them speeding east as well as hear them up close. The romance of American agriculture, commerce, and industry was contained in these visions.

Only when I became a professional artist did trucks appear as a recurring motif in my work. At the time, uncertain as to whether I could earn enough money to support myself, my plan B was to become a big rig driver. I invented the name “Darryl Licht Transport,” an imaginary cartage firm. “Transport” reflected my desire to transport people through my art, which would remain my primary occupation. “Darryl Licht” referred, perhaps, to the condition of my 1870s Chicago studio. Stationery from this enterprise is filed away somewhere.

The image of a truck appeared from time to time as my oeuvre evolved, much as it had in my father’s paintings and drawings. Our mutual interest seemed to be in the visual stimulation of the colors, shapes, textures, and other elements of visual language to be found in the maw of a garbage truck, the back of a livestock hauler, and countless other complex specimens of the cartage world.

Only much later did I consider the cultural connotations, the significance of what trucks mean to us subconsciously. In the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, I executed a series of paintings called Inland Romance. Chiefly abstracted from the urban landscape of the Midwest, forms generated into cranes, bridges, tracks, roadways and maps, and all manner of urban ironworks, these paintings had layers of network patterns, each extending over the entire canvas.

In 2003, on a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, I saw a painting I’d never seen by Dubuffet, one of the artists who had been most stimulating to me over the years. I do not recall its subject, but it had a soft abstract background of muted color and amorphous shapes on which was superimposed a line drawing in very liquid black paint. The graphic impact was strong. I wanted to make a painting like that!

Walking into John Himmelfarb’s studio in Chicago is like walking into a candy store, a visual onslaught of colors and excitement, followed by a rush of desire to have everything at once. The subject of an upcoming documentary, his work is included in more than 40 museum collections. Normally you can tell the style of the artist by looking at a few of their paintings. But, the visual vocabularies Himmelfarb employs are so diverse, that it could have been the work of several artists, frenzied cousins even. I caught up with him at his studio to find out more about what drives him and his work.

When did you come upon your unique style of painting?

In 2003, during a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, I came across a painting by DuBuffet, a favorite artist of mine since childhood. I don’t remember the imagery, only the technique. It had a varied color background over which lay an image executed in a very liquid, thick, black line. I admired the simplicity and effectiveness. Then I went back to my studio, laid down a blue and green background, mixed a fluid black, and began drawing without preconceptions. A truck emerged. Without knowing why, I knew that this was a very important image for me. It has continued to develop over the past eight years.

What inspired you to make Poem of Prospero? What do the symbols mean and what does it represent to you?

Since childhood, the way humans make marks in order to communicate with each other has fascinated me. Early memories to trips of Chinatown are predominately about the signage and the graphic qualities of the newspaper typography. Many of my own drawings since college days have looked like language: pictographic, hieroglyphic, calligraphic, etc.. (A show at Luise Ross Gallery in New York in 2007, Ideographic Sequence, examined this aspect of my work over a 30-year period. Jonathan Goodman covered this in Art In America.)

After traveling to Seoul for an exhibit of my work in 1996, my paintings referencing language changed to reflect the bold and regular quality of Korean commercial signage. Poem of Prospero is an example of such a painting.

If you were at the Koehnline Gallery in Oakton College, in Des Plaines, Illinois on the 6th of September, 2001 you would have walked into a large space carrying your cocktail and noticed two big canvases by John Himmelfarb, and a third canvas, 11 1/3 feet by 25 feet — completely blank. A few minutes later, a man mounted a ladder and began to punctuate this empty field with blue vertical stripes.

This was Himmelfarb’s first real public act of performance painting. Although the artist performed a large scale public performance painting in the 1980s inside the Toy Bank in Sioux City, Iowa, the Oakton Circle canvas, a tremendous effusion of color and shape, was set up to put the painter directly on the stage of art making. But it was hardly a gimmick. Five days later, with the September 11th attacks numbing the American population, to do anything creative seemed an act of defiance. On the 18th of September, when Himmelfarb continued working on the piece — and continued to perform for the public, most visitors saw in his work a reaction to the September 11th attacks.

Working two days a week until the 26th of October when the show came down (and Himmelfarb completed the work), the bulk of comments by visitors, students, curators and other artists centered on the emotionalism of the work, and how it was one American artist’s take on the world, now that America was deemed vulnerable, and living its life with its very open wound.

Himmelfarb’s most recent live giant painting project at Indiana University Northwest in Gary was called “John Himmelfarb Wall to Wall,” and ran from September 25 through October 25 2002. The canvas, a 9-foot by 65-foot monster, was installed and primed on September 30, with the painting completed on October 15.

Chicago-based Himmelfarb is no stranger to highly-charged emotional painting; he’s been working at it since he graduated from Harvard in 1968. His main subject might in fact be fear, or at least the complexity made from it. I remember a small print of his called Doctor’s Visit [aka, Physical]. Here a small boy, rendered in a child-like scrawl visibly flips out at the sight of a hypodermic needle. The lines, like many of his works, are scraggly, nervous and yet highly controlled. The larger works, contain the same drama of the line, reaching out for the far edges of the canvas or paper, never quite ending. Fear is like that as well.

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.
—Carl Sandburg, Chicago

Since 1993 John Himmelfarb has been working on the series Inland Romance, a sequence of paintings reflecting the artist’s romantic attachment to the city of Chicago. Like Carl Sandburg’s poem Chicago, Himmelfarb’s artistic vocabulary relates to the “down to earth” elements of the urban environment. The majority of these elements are inspired from industrial forms, such as venting systems from factory roofs, chimneys, elevated structures, cranes, scrap yards or railroad equipment. Others relate to the rapid rhythm of the city through aerial views that captured the ever-changing patterns of rivers, roads, bridges and paths.

In the introduction to the book Chicago Stories: Tales of the City, Chicago author Stuart Dybek characterizes the local writers as a product of the unique urban environment and their tendency to romance the city. “Chicago,” writes Dybek, “is an outlook from the perspective of the country’s third coast, a sweet water inland sea surrounded by prairie, a locus at the center of America where there’s not much patience with fads or pretension.

“Finally, at the core of the Chicago Tradition there is an insistence on sentiment,” he continues. “Not on sentimentality, but on basic emotion, the complex mix of passion and empathy we term the human heart.”

Himmelfarb’s concept of Inland Romance corresponds to Dybek’s perception of the Chicago writers. “The romantic attachment to the region,” says Himmelfarb, “is the reason why I am here, and my paintings reflect where I am creating as well as who I am. The two are connected.”

The exhibition at the William A. Koehnline Gallery explores the literal association of Himmelfarb to the City of the Big Shoulders. The monumentality of the city echoes in the large-scale canvases, the patterns of the paintings emerge from the vocabulary of the urban landscape, and the communicative element is manifested by the artist working on one of the canvases during the exhibition.

In conjunction with this exhibition, Oakton’s theater deportment will present a multimedia performance inspired by Himmelfarb’s theme of the Inland Romance series. The production will include writings by Chicago authors Carl Sandburg, Studs Terkel, Mike Royko, Nelson Algren and others about their visions of the city.

I would like to thank Mr. Gerald Nordland for his essay in this catalog, which illuminates the unique aspects of this exhibition in respect to Himmelfarb’s overall career. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Jean Albano Gallery, Chicago; the theater production by Karol Verson, Performing Arts Center at Oakton; and the video project by Tim Raetzman, Television & Production Services at Oakton.

Nathan Harpaz, Curator
William A. Koehnline Gallery

John Himmelfarb’s paintings continue to drive the critics into paroxysms of superlatives. “Vibrant colour, eloquent line, painterly brushwork. Dynamic composition on a grand scale,” say the catalogue notes for the Christchurch exhibition.

“Himmelfarb can be referenced to a fine pedigree of artists and movements illustrating a contextual richness and a highly ferocious visual appetite,” another critic writes.

The object of all this devotion remains unfazed by the dense thickets of artspeak.

Himmelfarb instead seems continually fascinated by the simple evolution of his work, the shifts in style and perception, the experiences and observations which become part of his artistic biography.

“Style seems to change rather rapidly. There are identifiable periods which can last for two months or two years,” he says.

“A sea-change began in 2000. It saw the paintings becoming less tightly controlled and more playful, more expansive.

“Something must have clicked which made me more confident to simply go at it rather than having everything buttoned down.

“My main concern is using a visual language rather than trying to tell stories or make profound political statements.

“I can intellectualise about a painting’s construction — how to create interest with a sense of form and resolution, but it is rare for me to have another message apart from an expression of exuberance, life, and communication.

“Over all, I am attempting to create a rich visual experience.”

John Himmelfarb was born near Chicago. His roots lie deep In the Mid-West soil. He grew up in Winfield, Illinois, where the tangled vegetation of the thick woods surrounding his home became a prime source of imagery in his painting.

His parents were both painters. On Sundays, his father would allow him into his studio “if I kept quiet”, he says.

Himmelfarb spent a childhood surrounded by painting. His parents were deeply interested in 20th-century art. Works by Picasso, Pollock, and Kandinsky became an integral part of their son’s emotional landscape.

“I guess that I was raised on abstract expressionism,” he says.

Music replaced painting for several years before he began to draw again while a student at Harvard University.

Paul Klee was once quoted describing his approach to his work as that of “an active line on a walk, moving freely, without a goal. A walk for walk’s sake.” This quote is appropriate for describing John Himmelfarb’s drawings, paintings, and graphic work.

An established Chicago-based artist whose work is represented in major museum collections around the world, this was, surprisingly, his first solo exhibition in Chicago since 1988, providing local audiences the opportunity to experience the exuberance and complexity of a mature artist’s accomplishments in multiple media.

Himmelfarb’s works suggest several sources of imagination — the formal rawness of the Art Brut and CoBrA movements; the improvisational spirit of automatism; the magical properties of hieroglyphs and totems — channeled into a rich personal vocabulary. Line has always been Himmelfarb’s signature formal element and remains so. Bold contours are applied with both speed and deliberateness in his paintings, drawings, prints, and ceramics to articulate figure from ground, and, of special importance, to create and direct movement. His diverse body of work is unified by an acute sense for orchestrating a continuous rhythm in his compositions. The tempo of each work is carefully dictated through juxtapositions of several weights of line, whose application varies from the delicate, pencil-fine loops of handwritten notations to the bold, paint-dripping boundaries of a three-inch band.

Inland Romance: Passage Blue Island is a tactile, acrylic painting of dense, interlocking shapes and a snaking lattice-work of lines whose colorful patchwork geometry resembles the abstract and irregular plan of a mythic European city. Overlapping arteries of pale greens and faded blues unite and separate mosaics of yellow, steel blue, and dull red. The compact and dense topography leaves no breathing room as large and small shapes, organic and geometric, strain in an animated restlessness against the boundaries of the canvas.

The density of Inland Romance: Passage Blue Island contrasts the open compositions of Himmelfarb’s risk-laden works on paper, which provide a greater viewing challenge and reward. In works such as Xplosion of Transport and Xit Treble Clef, a raw and improvised surface is actually achieved through Himmelfarb’s intuitive understanding of the critical placement of each delicate doodle, meandering scribble, and bold contour that define the “color” and texture of these edgy black-and-white works.

Himmelfarb’s successful works have always encouraged one to experience them as a tapestry describing a journey. Guiding us through both enigmatic and familiar landmarks, a sense of order prevails as one understands that Himmelfarb’s confident line will aid us in maintaining our direction. Through his work, we are reminded that the journey is often more important than the destination.

This exhibition brings together paintings by Samuel, Eleanor and John Himmelfarb — father, mother and son, respectively. While in the works of these artists there exist unique aesthetic sensibilities and highly personalized vocabularies, there are shared artistic concerns and common visual elements which unite the three beyond their family ties. One might investigate these paintings without regard for the actual kinship of their creators. This exhibition, however, offers the viewer an opportunity to make comparisons among these various works as well as among these artists.

Born in Latvia, Samuel Himmelfarb worked primarily in Wisconsin, New York and Illinois before he died at the age of 71 in 1976. Although his career as an artist began in the 1920s, in this exhibition he is represented by paintings executed in the late 1960s through the mid-1970s. The human figure was the primary and constant subject to occupy the artist throughout his lifetime. Samuel’s portrayal of the figure, generally in a narrative context/ developed from his early, straightforward realist works into more expressionistic approaches and eventually into abstraction. The individuals who populate these paintings are ordinary people engaged in ordinary activities. In Samuel’s hand, they are transformed into dynamically rendered and visually charged images.

Chief among the characteristics which typify Samuel’s mature works are the use of abstracted figures, subjects constructed with blocks of color to produce a patterned surface; paint applied in a cool, nearly mechanical technique and three dimensional space flattened to create ambiguous spatial illusions. In this exhibition, the painting Adriatic Ferry (c. 1975) offers a good example of these traits.

The driving force behind Samuel’s interest in exploring these scenes of ordinary people was his desire to celebrate everyday life. Through his choice of subject and unique approach, he directs the viewer’s attention to those aspects of life common to most individuals, allowing the viewer to actively and personally become engaged with the action depicted. We enter Samuel’s paintings not as strangers but rather as insiders, possessing an inherent understanding of the characters acting out these familiar narratives.

Eleanor Himmelfarb was born in St. Charles, Illinois and currently lives and works in Winfield Township. Included here is a selection of works from the past four years. These paintings evidence Eleanor’s Interest in nature—in particular the landscape. At times, by juxtaposing natural subjects with the human figure, she suggests the interaction between them. Saturated colors, gestural brushwork and free-floating imagery animate the paintings and enable them to transcend the sense of tranquil isolation often associated with traditional landscape painting. Unlike more traditional approaches to the landscape, these works are not replications or interpretations of a given place but rather they focus on the concept of landscape in a broader sense, carrying a message for the viewer to decipher.

In the two variations of Summertime and Wintertime (both from 1990), one can see how Eleanor’s investigations of her subjects produce highly personal and often surreal renditions of nature. As in each of Eleanor’s other paintings, dimensional space is dramatically altered to produce a fractured plane. Elements move freely throughout this artificial environment in a gravity-free world wholly of the artist’s invention. This freedom re-enforces each element’s function as a landscape “symbol” and the existence of these paintings as landscape “ideas” rather than renditions of real locales.

Like her husband, Eleanor Himmelfarb investigates the ordinary in life through these works. But rather than portray recognizable activities or events, she focuses on the more enigmatic aspects of her landscape subjects. Because her depictions of the world are centered less on specific locations or common human pursuits they are free to explore life’s cycles in a universal context. She uses the iconography of nature — coupled with the human form, architectural references and other elements — to illustrate and illuminate her conceptual approach to humanity’s place in nature.

Rural Illinois provided many formative experiences for John Himmelfarb which would prove to affect his approach to art. Raised near the town of Winfield, in relative isolation from an urban or suburban environment John left his native Midwest to study at Harvard, where he received a broad liberal arts education. There he spent much time in the Visual Studies program at the Carpenter Center. He eventually came back to Illinois and currently lives in Oak Park, maintaining a studio in the urban setting of Chicago.

Included in this group are works from 1992 to the present. In this selection, the viewer can readily see elements which John draws from the work of each of his parents. He combines this “inherited” vocabulary with his own unique iconography and personal techniques. Among the main characteristics found in John’s works are his use of animated, sometimes familiar subjects; flattened space and repeated forms which produce an overall pattern effect, and a limited palette within a given painting, often exhibiting tightly controlled color relationships. Particular subjects deal with the intense, complex urban landscape. Slag City (Inland Romance) and Gary’s Mill (Inland Romance) (both 1993) are excellent examples.

These new paintings, though open to personal interpretation, offer less opportunity for specific readings and provide a more indirect message than did John’s previous works. Reaching back to re-approach some of his drawings from the 1970s, John combines his current urban industrial surroundings with these earlier sources for inspiration. In these recent manifestations, the main subjects are human-crafted environments rather than the figures and foliage of his prior work. These new paintings also display some Midwestern regional influences as indicated by one of the new series titles — “Inland Romance.”

One can explore an artistic evolution as it is traced through the work of Samuel, Eleanor and John Himmelfarb. Immediately, a number of commonalities are evident. Paintings by each investigate what might be termed a “narrative of nature” — whether in a poignant human episode, a rural landscape or a concentrated urban scene. The narrative is observed and recorded through a formal, visual process which incorporates at various times any or all of the following: reorganization and reinvention of the subject’s actual dimensional space; employment of a selective, sometimes restricted color palette, and stylization of the imagery to produce a patterned, labyrinth-like effect.

Another and even greater mutual concern is the shared philosophy of visual aesthetics which is at the heart of the work of all three artists. Stemming from a fundamentally modernist foundation which focuses on the visual dynamics developed in the work, this philosophy is manifested here through each artist’s unique vocabulary and the common need for an integrated art work. Without betraying the intellectual or emotional content in their paintings, these artists display their commitment to creating visually compelling images.

Every artist, in one form or another, inherits something from the art of the past. In the case of these three, the legacy extends not only far backwards into the history of art but outwards into each other’s work as well. Whether speaking philosophically, conceptually or technically, the art of Samuel, Eleanor and John Himmelfarb finds a natural interrelationship, based not on chance but on a shared belief in the function of visual language.

René Paul Barilleaux
Director of Exhibitions and Collections/ Chief Curator
Mississippi Museum of Art
Jackson, Mississippi

SAMUEL HIMMELFARB

A $5 award in elementary school for a poster exhorting the townspeople to raise vegetables for the starving Armenians set Samuel Himmelfarb on an art-centered life, although even then he wasn’t sure how Milwaukee-raised tomatoes could help. He attended Milwaukee State Teacher’s College where his mentor was German-born artist, Gustav Moeller. Later he attended University of Wisconsin, Madison. For a time he taught for the WPA in Milwaukee, then went on to the Art Students League in New York and the National Academy of Design. For some years he worked as an architectural designer in New York before returning to the Chicago area.

Having lived through the Great Depression he did not feel secure enough to give all for art. He kept a rigid 3-day-a-week schedule for painting, devoting the other four to industrial design in his exhibit firm. After selling his business he spent full time at his studio in Pilsen until his death in December, 1976.

Many summers were spent painting at his cabin on Madeline Island in lake Superior. Music and travel occupied time away from work. At 19 he organized a dance band and played the drums on the President Line for shipboard dances and at stops in the Orient. Interest in music was always a primary focus. He began studying piano after selling his business.

Himmelfarb exhibited in Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors annual shows at the Milwaukee Art Museum for many years where several of his works are in the permanent collection. He showed also in the Chicago and Vicinity annuals at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1938, 40, 42, 43 and 51 where he won the James Broadus Clark award. His work was also included in the 5th International Water Color Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1936. He participated in the members shows at The Arts Club of Chicago over a long period of years. His entry in the 60th Annual American Show, 1951, was selected for a circulating show through many museums in the U.S., and he was represented in a collection selected by Katharine Kuh which traveled to museums in Germany and France.

One-man shows took place at Milwaukee Art Museum, Allis Art Library, Milwaukee; Panoras Gallery, New York, as well as the Ryan Gallery, Chicago. Three-person shows included Rosary College, River Forest, IL; Judson College, Elgin IL; One Illinois Center, Chicago and Bradley Gallery, Milwaukee. Recently his work was shown at Fermi Laboratory Gallery in Batavia in a three-person show, along with the work of John and Eleanor.

ELEANOR HIMMELFARB

Eleanor Himmelfarb, a native of the Chicago area, presently resides in a deeply wooded area on the edge of a glacial moraine beside the west branch of the DuPage River. After her years at the University of Chicago and life and work in Hyde Park, in 1942 she returned to the rural setting near St. Charles, IL, where she was born. Here, she and her husband built a home, and their children Susan and John were born.

At the University of Chicago she had courses in art history and design but there no studio work was offered. Later, at The Morton Arboretum, under the spell of Mae Watts, her interest in art became more than philosophical and theoretical. In addition to working there, where she eventually taught for many years, she took classes at the Art Institute, the School of Design and studio work with Abbott Pattison, Claude Bentley and Morris Barzani, but the major part of her art training came from working in her husband’s studio.

In addition to her active painting schedule, Himmelfarb for many years taught courses in painting and design at Rosary College, Triton College and the College of DuPage. Currently she teaches exclusively for the DuPage Art League. In 1993, she was artist-in-residence at Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois.

Himmelfarb’s work is included in many corporate and private collections, including collections at the American National Bank, the Harris Bank, Kirkland & Ellis, and Deloitte & Touche, Continental Illinois Bank and Ideal Industries. Her gallery exhibitions include one-woman shows at the Jan Cicero Gallery, Chicago; Gallery 72 in Omaha, and Chicago Street Gallery in Lincoln, IL; Sven Parson Gallery, Northern Illinois University, University Club, Chicago, North Central College, and Riverwalk Gallery, Naperville, IL; College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL, and IIT, Chicago. Two- and three-person shows featuring her work have been held at Johnson County Art Council Gallery, Iowa City; Rosary College, River Forest; One Illinois Center, Chicago; Bradley Gallery, Milwaukee; Judson College, Elgin, IL, and Barrington Center Arts Council, Barrington, IL. Her work has been included in many group shows including The Chicago and Vicinity Show at the Chicago Art Institute, 1985; The Chicago and Vicinity Show presented at the Chicago Cultural Center by the Art Institute and The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990; the 32nd Illinois State Invitational Springfield, 1980, and in group shows at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, The Peltz Gallery, Milwaukee; Volid Gallery, Chicago, Evanston Art Center, International ArtExpo Navy Pier; Beverly Art Center, Chicago; the Norris Gallery in St. Charles, Il, and the Decatur Art Museum, Decatur, IL.

JOHN HIMMELFARB

John Himmelfarb, son of Eleanor and Samuel, was born in 1946 in Chicago, Illinois. He grew up in deeply wooded Winfield Township in a household of artists. John finished his undergraduate studies at Harvard University in liberal arts with a major in Architectural Sciences. He opened a studio in Chicago in 1970 and has worked primarily in Chicago since that time.

Over forty art institutions have his work in their collections including The Art Institute of Chicago; The Arkansas Art Center; The Baltimore Museum of Art; The Brooklyn Museum; Centre Pompidou Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris; The Cleveland Museum of Art; The DesMoines Art Center; The Fogg Art Museum, The High Museum; The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, The Madison Art Center; The Minneapolis Institute of Art; The National Museum of American Arts; and The Toledo Museum of Art.

John has had one person shows at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York regularly since he joined the gallery in 1977. In addition he has had one-person shows at Area X and John Nichols Gallery, both also in New York, and numerous one-person shows in cities across the country including the Brodys’ Gallery in Washington, D.C., Gallery 72 in Omaha, Spaightwood Gallery in Madison, Peltz Gallery in Milwaukee, Barbara Balkin and Dorothy Rosenthal Galleries in Chicago, and Graphics I & II in Boston. Forthcoming one-person shows are scheduled at Gallery 1756, Chicago; Terry Dintenfass, New York; The Chicago Cultural Center; and the Mindy Oh Gallery in Chicago.

Past one-person museum shows include Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Davenport Museum of Art, Madison Art Center, Arkansas Art Center, Miami University Art Museum, the Huntington Art Museum in West Virginia, and the Illinois State Museum.

Beginning in 1968 his work has been included in many group shows throughout this country and abroad. He has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from the Illinois Arts Council.

The interviewer is Susan Stewart, partner and graphic designer in Stewart & Stewart, printers and publishers since 1980.

John Himmelfarb earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard University with a liberal arts major in architectural studies. He returned to Chicago, where he had grown up in a household of artists, to open a studio. A painter and printmaker, he has worked with several master printers; in the last few years he has created a dozen screenprints in collaboration with Norman Stewart at the workshop in Bloomfield Hills.

Do you think that your reading influenced the calligraphic prints that you recently completed at Stewart & Stewart?

I got the idea for this series about two years ago, when I read Hardison’s series of essays* analyzing parts of American society and commerce in terms of the metaphor of disappearing. One example was banking. Fifty years ago one went to the bank with real money: paper banknotes and coins. The bank was built of stone. You put the money in the bank literally and they’d store it. Today, you have a plastic card and stick it into a machine in a wall. There’s no real bank there. Often, no real money. Yet all kinds of transactions take place. The bank has disappeared and the money has disappeared and electronic signals credit or debit your database. Hardison also talks about deconstructionism in literature, which advocated removing or weakening the meaning of specific words so they could be used in a more playful or plastic manner.

It seems somewhat humorous to me, if taken to its extreme. In removing the meaning of words, the possibility for verbal communication ends. But I thought, well, if you can take the meaning out of words, why not take the words out of the text? And be left with just the shell of the text. Even in college I was doing drawings that were a play on the alphabet, taking the letters and extrapolating, expanding, decorating. I had been drawing dense fields of lines and marks which, after a few years, started dividing into grids, and later into rows and columns. The format of rows and columns led naturally to the calligraphic works.

* O.B. Hardison Jr., Disappearing Through the Skylight, Viking, New York, 1989.

Were those college drawings influenced by an artist-teacher?

No. I think it was just stream of consciousness, playful. I was experimenting with a new Rapidograph pen and seeing what it could do. I don’t remember a specific influence. I certainly was aware of Mark Tobey and his “white writing.” I had seen a lot of 1950s and 1960s art that played with alphabets in both the print world and the drawing and painting world. While not a conscious impetus then, it was part of my background.

The tools in calligraphy are not Rapidograph pens and their nibs. So the technical aspect of the tool wasn’t important to you.

No, and I had never really worked with Western calligraphic pens. I did have an interest in Eastern writing from early childhood. We would visit Chinatown and I would take the newspaper home and just enjoy the way it looked. In high school, an exchange student gave me a Japanese dictionary and tried to teach me a little about how characters are made. In college, a friend of Chinese background tried to teach me to make characters using a brush. But I didn’t pursue it in any concentrated way. The calligraphic drawings that I did in the 1970s took the marks I had been making and organized them to form characters which filled an entire page comer to corner. They looked more like a Rosetta Stone or a tablet of some sort.

The Hardison book made me start thinking in terms of Western documents. In suggesting the possibility of words disappearing, losing their meaning, I imagined words disappearing from the text. This focused my attention on text. Then a literature professor who saw two of the calligraphic drawings sent me a note, saying that one struck her as a letter from a person of the Victorian age and the other from another period of English literature, another social stratum. That helped bring me to the letter format — it was one of those times when an idea suddenly snaps in your head.

From an artistic point of view, the idea of breaking down the page from an all-over tablet form to the text of a letter gave me some other things to work with in designing the page. I would have blocks of information and I could organize those blocks in the way that a graphic designer or a fine artist might organize a geometric composition of squares and circles and rectangles. I would have open areas of unarticulated space juxtaposed to specific shapes of text. It wasn’t that I was just trying to mimic a letter. It offered me a way to go on with calligraphic drawing in a new way rather than repeating tablet forms.

The images that came to my mind when seeing this series of your work were Egyptian hieroglyphics and especially the Limbourg brothers’ Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry [1413-1416] with calligraphy near the illuminated miniatures. Did any other historical materials influence this work?

Not on a terribly conscious level; in fact, the idea took off quickly on its own. But all those things are part of my background. From childhood I saw things like sculpture, books, objects at the Field Museum, and even as a child I saw a lot of work in museums in France and Italy. But it’s back a few layers in my consciousness. It’s the kind of thing that comes up now when one looks at the work, the same way one reads a work of literature, being aware of references and associations it brings to mind. That’s where it get its richness. How many of those echoes are similar to the author’s is not critical. The work is suggestive and leads one to make associations due to the way it’s written. Although I’d say that someone with a rich background in anything is going to bring more to bear on a work of art than someone who doesn’t have any other reference point. They’ll see only the art on the page. They won’t see it in other contexts.

Many younger Americans no longer read for pleasure. I wonder if this has a bearing on the disappearing words in the Hardison essays? Does this period of your work stem from the idea that reading will become extinct?

I don’t think that I was concerned with that in this work. Although it has crossed my mind. Here, the idea is that the words we see on the page aren’t necessarily the meaning contained in the letter. The meaning is more relevant than the form of the letter and the actual words we read are often merely a facade or even a mask for an underlying meaning that we can’t see. In order to read critically and to derive a richer meaning from what we’re looking at, we have to look at underlying meanings, hidden meanings, whether or not they are intended. A lawyer might write a very formal, polite letter to someone that’s full of flourishes, when in fact it’s a threat. And if you’re not able to understand or read between the lines, you’re missing the point.

Or missing things left unsaid.

Right. A reader is informed by the quality of the paper, the character of the type, the method of printing, the use of space on the page. A highly formalized presentation may undercut the message of an informal and friendly letter. When each typewriter had its own character, more personal letters were typed. Today’s computer printers leave less trace of individuality, and, after a brief jump in personal letters produced on them, today thoughtful writers are returning to the handwritten letter for family, friends and colleagues.

His artist’s statement is as follows:
My paintings are exceedingly friendly. Like me, they speak easily for themselves. Look at them from a distance and then move in. You’ll be amazed at how you become involved if you go along.

In a world wired for computerized, programmed probability patterns, I record the unprogrammed, the unglorified, the casual human scene. Essentially I’m a narrator developing intriguing ‘thing’ patterns formed unglorified, the casual human scene. Essentially I’m a narrator developing intriguing ‘thing’ patterns formed by overlapping ornamentation of people shapes, thing shapes, and color shapes. Together they form an active, vibrating, coherent narrative. The depiction of simple happening on a city street — in a beanery — on a bus ride — becomes a tune in praise of the unspectacular. Recording the happenings of unimportant people as people spaces and people as they perform daily rituals with artless solemnity — that’s my ‘thing.’ Creating a compelling interplay between people spaces and people things is crucial. Remove one form and the tense magic is broken.

I no longer permit myself the illusive luxury of dynamic brush work to express an intuitive impulse. Today I use the cool, deliberate terminology of the clean edge and taut surface to isolate and freeze a human moment in space; To imprint in on canvas in cool, studied, sensitive unity; To create from a visual episode forms that are precise yet complicated — lucid yet inventive — to reduce and expand that critical moment to a geometric synthesis of the literal scene.

From the time he began showing in Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors Exhibitions to the present, his work has been seen in exhibitions around the country, including the Chicago Annuals and the American Exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has been an award winner. His paintings have been in an American Federation of Art traveling exhibit and in a collection chosen from a Navy Pier show and sent to museums in France and Germany. He is represented in the permanent collection at the Milwaukee Art Center. He has been a popular speaker throughout the country, on design and contemporary concepts in art.

JOHN HIMMELFARB, son of Eleanor and Samuel, is a painter. He grew up in a household of artists surrounded by their art and the countryside that inspired them. John finished his undergraduate studies at Harvard University in liberal arts with a major in architectural sciences. He continued in the Harvard Graduate School in education. His intention was to teach elementary school in the daytime and paint at night. This proved to be too difficult. He now gives his full attention to painting. He draws and paints large whimsical pieces in which animal and human heads are hidden in gestural markings waiting to be visually discovered and pounce. His use of strong line focuses the viewer’s attention to the patterning and design. The work is in direct discourse with the work of his mother and his late father yet it takes its own turns and strong individual direction.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Illinois State Museum, Springfield, Madison Art Center in Wisconsin, Minneapolis Institute of Art, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio and the Vassar College Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, New York are just a few of over forty institutions that have his work in their collections. John has had one person shows in private galleries in New York City, Chicago, Evanston, Washington, D.C., Milwaukee and other cities in the United States and one in the Tallers Josep Llorens Artigas in Gallifa, Spain. In addition he has had one person exhibits in the Miami University Art Museum in Oxford, Ohio, Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Blanden Museum of Art in Fort Dodge, Iowa, the Davenport Art Museum in Iowa, the Albrecht Art Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri and Illinois State Museum in Springfield.

Fermilab is most grateful to John Himmelfarb and Eleanor Himmelfarb for putting together this collection of artwork and loaning it to the Second Floor Gallery. The exhibit will be on display through March.

The New York opening of John Himmelfarb’s latest paintings was only a few weeks away, but the Oak Parker had things other than painting on his mind during an interview earlier this month.

What other things? Garbage, for example.

A member of a west suburban solid waste commission, Himmelfarb has several trade magazines on waste disposal and recycling scattered around his Pilsen studio.

“I’m excited about the subject,” said the soft-spoken and eloquent Himmelfarb. “I find that the issues are very important. It’s nice to be able to try and solve some problems.”

Without dismissing the very real dilemma of excess waste, and the potential solutions in recycling, Himmelfarb generally solves problems in an artistic way. His career over the past two decades has steadily propelled his reputation to the upper echelons of the art world, and subsequently established him in a career far different from the one … continued on page E4

[ unfortunately, the remainder of the interview is unavailable ]

Drawing and its voice, the line, have often been associated with the first inspiration of the artist. Because of this, drawing has been regarded as more pure in concept than other modes of artistic expression. In drawing, the artist can go directly from thought process to image, unencumbered by complex materials or extensive preparation. With this immediacy, drawing can accommodate all attitudes, whether an artist is reacting directly to forms in the physical environment, refining forms of the memory, inventing new forms, or even planning complicated relationships among forms.

Artists today have, with increasing intensity, seriously investigated the nature of the drawing. Major energies have been expended in a fundamental reevaluation of the medium and its usage. With this process of reevaluation and renewal, drawing has continued to move from the context of a support medium, an adjunct to painting and sculpture, to a major and independent medium with distinctive expressive possibilities altogether its own. In fact, as this exhibition demonstrates, drawing does not involve only pencil, pen, or brush, but also the various techniques and media of collage, assemblage, and painting.

The evolution of this attitude toward drawing extends back to the Renaissance when drawing was equated with invention, with the engendering of the idea or form of things. Regarded as both a poetic and scientific discipline, drawing acquired high intellectual credentials. Without drawing, it would have been impossible to describe the newly emerging disciplines of anatomy, geometry, and perspective, which were basics to achieving the Renaissance goal of scientifically accurate rendering of nature. At the same time drawing was a tool for expressing the Renaissance’s new found regard for human invention and imagination.

Contemporary artists such as Ada Medina, who sees drawing as a process for making ideas clear, build on this Renaissance beginning. Medina envisions unique drawings like Ejemplo (1984) with earth-like planes, primary forms, space, and light within imaginary sites. She states that her works “aspire to evoke inner states and not merely to define physical reality. I strive for drawings that can capture tension, unease, and quietude through the vehicle of unassuming elemental subjects.” ¹

The 1972 charcoal and paint stick drawing by Richard Serra has an effect of opening thought beyond the habitual patterns imposed by speech. Velvety-rich darks give visual form to what may be impossible to put into words. Form is a constant metamorphic passage between one state and another. Serra’s drawing is characteristic of his means used to convey this sense of passage.

John Himmelfarb’s complex and calligraphic drawing heralds the notion of the artist as translator. A fascinating mixture of vibrant line and figurative distortions populate this large-scale brush and ink drawing of 1975-1979. Only after we have looked closely do recognizable forms emerge. Himmelfarb explains: “The image is a vehicle for getting on the page a design that reflects my energy map of the world. It’s a way of translating the way I feel about the world into a pattern. When somebody else reads it, even if they don’t see the imagery, they can respond to the energy of the design.” ²

Marvin Israel’s drawing from the Man Series is a harsh comment on man’s inhumanity to his own kind. This 1973 work is a tortured image of a half-naked man whose flesh is bruised and bound in metal, whose head and upraised arms are covered so that only his chin and a part of his mouth are visible. The physically degraded figure is disturbing and unsettling in the extreme. This effect is heightened by Israel’s placement of the image to the front of the picture plane, thus causing us to confront this sorrowful vision.

The purest mode of drawing is delineation which can be seen in Henri Matisse’s Head of a Girl (1944). In this brilliant use of line, different aspects of the figure have been reduced to contour image unmodulated by effects of light and shadow.

Study for Shift by Bridget Riley is a study for a 1963 painting. The best known of the English “Op” artists, Riley employed optical illusions and devices, such as that seen here. The repeated black and white triangles seem to shift so as to create an illusion that the paper is not flat.

Gustav Klimt’s 1895 untitled portrait of a bearded man and Lyonel Feininger’s Veiled Sunset (1945) present a mode of drawing wherein effects of light and shadow have been added to the linear contour. Robert Michel obtained tones in his Demonstration 2 (1920) by radiating lines. Michel’s work demonstrates that drawing does not involve only pencil or pen, but also the various techniques of collage and assemblage.

Color-value drawing, in which light and dark areas express the difference in tones, represents still another mode of drawing. Robert Arneson’s Clown (1978), Robert Henri’s Model in Red (ca. 1920), and Egon Schiele’s Untitled (Female Nude) (1913) approach as closely as possible the effects of light and form expressed by color-value drawings. Schiele’s use of color is identified with his artwork of this period. Color is used sparingly along the contours of the figure to heighten the interior definitions of the spine, edge of the buttocks, and shoulder blade. The touches of blue in the discarded garment are repeated at various places along the left side of the body: the shoulder and shoulder blade, the wrist, and the waist. This contrasts with the oranges which are also used to define contours. The color of the paper itself forms the basic color of the figure along with the faint washes of gray and pink. The resulting effect is a figure charged with energy, despite the lack of gestures or overt movement.

Nancy Graves’ drawing Archaeoninus (1980-81) is invigorated with elaborate patterns of vivid color, using acrylic, pastel, and graphite. Drawings such as this are difficult to distinguish from paintings; therefore, watercolors are generally considered a class of colored drawings.

Adolf Woelfli’s work was discovered by more experienced artists during the past half century. Woelfli suffered from schizophrenia and lived over half of his life in a mental institution. In his 1923 drawing Schaggi im Graas, flat, two-dimensional forms completely cover the surface of the paper as though the artist was reluctant to leave any of it untouched by his pencils or his presence. The decorative effect is embellished by masked faces which emerge throughout the composition and which apparently contained some personal symbolism for the artist.

What we can extract from this diverse group of drawings is a sense of the artist’s mind or the process of thinking and selecting. These drawings help us see the world of forms and our own environment in a new way and, possibly, inspire us to develop additional ways of seeing. They give us not only an intimate glimpse of the deep commitment of artists’ search and experimentation with ideas and form, but also insight into the distinguished drawing collection at the Art Center.

M. Jessica Rowe
Associate Director

John Himmelfarb (American, born 1946)
Untitled, 1975-79
Pen and ink with wash on paper, 48 x 96 inches
Purchased with funds from the Gardner and Florence Call Cowles Foundation, 1980.18

John Himmelfarb is not a starving artist; a partial list of his exhibits, collections that contain his paintings (everything from the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris’s Centre Pompidou to the Sioux City Art Center), grants and awards received and visiting artist/lecturer gigs fill the best part of five pages. His sixth New York one-man show just opened at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery on West 57th St. On the other hand, he says, “making a living as an artist is hard work. It lakes an enormous amount of time to keep organized enough to do business. Building a national career, to the point of feeling like you’re reasonably well rewarded, is a long, slow process.”

Himmelfarb, 46, and family — his wife, Molly Day, a reading specialist at the University of Chicago Lab School, son Forest, 11, and daughter Serena Aurora, 4 — came to Oak Park in 1984 from Hyde Park, “when we needed a house with a yard.” He’d had contact with the village for 10 years before that, thanks to exhibits of his paintings and a visiting artist program.

He grew up in exurban Winfield and his first impulse was toward music: he studied violin and piano, and played in community orchestras and the Chicago Youth Symphony. But the visual arts lured him: “I was raised in a family where they were important (both his parents were artists), and although I didn’t get a lot of formal training, I had examples all around me.”

At Harvard, he took a pre-architecture program — giving him a basic background in design — followed by an independent study in Drawing. “That was the fatal attraction,” he says with a laugh. His first national exhibit was mounted in 1968, his senior year in college.

Himmelfarb developed a distinctive style that remains recognizably his own as it evolves. “I started with very small-scale pen and ink drawings — lots of tiny marks that built up into large masses. Then the scale built up — there were still lots of small marks, but they added up into large-scale forms.”

At his current Terry Dintenfass Gallery Show, the works on display are all new paintings — produced within the last two years — ranging from smaller, 16×20-inch works to 8×12-foot compositions. “They all seem to have some sense of reference to landscape, but they’re all fairly abstract,” says their creator. “They have a sense of place, but they’re not realistic.”

There’s a difference between the kind of show one mounts at a gallery and a museum exhibit, he points out: “For a museum, you want to show a broad range over a period of time. For a dealer, you want a unified theme.”

Himmelfarb works primarily in two dimensions, in paintings and drawings. “l used to do some small-scale ceramic sculpture; more recently, I’ve done some bronze reliefs. I’m also working to get a commission for a ceramic tile mural.”

With their sense of form and shape, Himmelfarb’s images seem in some ways a logical evolution from the quasi-realistic regionalist Thomas Hart Benton’s complex visual rhythms, through Benton’s student Jackson Pollock, the latter among the artists Himmelfarb says have influenced him, along with Picasso and Kimura. “I grew up on the Modernist movement: I was not influenced so much by the mainstream art of the ’60s and ’70s.”

His recent paintings have all been in acrylics, rather than oils, but for a very pragmatic, rather than artistic, reason — at least at first. “l’ve switched hack and forth between acrylic and oils over the years. I gave up on oils last when I was still working in my house in Oak Park — I had to use the family room, in the basement, because oils are so smelly, and the fumes stink. It was a poisonous atmosphere.”

Towering structures of stone and glass define the new DuPage landscape.

But it’s the hills, forests and farmland of an earlier time that Winfield native John Himmelfarb most often shares with the world.

An established and well-respected artist, Himmelfarb has produced work that can be found in the collections of 37 art museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.

While Himmelfarb, 44, could have chosen the heady life of a New York artist — where his art receives higher acclaim than in Chicago — this soft-spoken, engaging man has decided to work in two rooms of a converted warehouse on Halsted Street.

The artwork that has won raves and spawned two books is stacked in rolls and on shelves in the cavernous studios. Some are still in cartons just back from a traveling show. A large canvas is spread on the floor. The paint he uses is thin and would run if the canvas were propped on an easel. So he paints from above, careful not to drip paint on his socks.

Today he lives in Oak Park with his wife, Molly Day, and children, Forest and Serena Aurora, but he was raised in a largely rural DuPage at a time when the county was more country than concrete. The experience still influences his work.

“In the woods, I never saw horizon lines,” he says. “When I looked up at the sky it was filled with something. The urge to fill up every inch with detail may have come from that.”

At first glance, many of his paintings and sketches appear to be just that — black lines hurrying to and fro or wrapping themselves around randomly placed colors. But on closer inspection, faces, forms or entire landscapes come into view.

“The borderline between image and abstraction fascinates me,” he says.

It seems to fascinate the art world, too, for Himmelfarb has displayed his paintings, sketches, wood prints and lithographs in more than 30 one-man shows and over 60 group exhibitions.

Surprisingly, he did not set out to be an artist, even though he was surrounded by art from an early age. His parents, Sam and Eleanor, were both artists, “but I didn’t take it too seriously because they were my parents,” he said. “In high school I concentrated on music. “

Had the term been in vogue then, Himmelfarb would likely have been labeled “gifted.” He studied both piano and violin and played the violin with the Wheaton College Orchestra, the DuPage Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Youth Symphony.

Attending high school in a conservative DuPage also influenced his unsettled and challenging style.

“I went to Wheaton High School,” he recalls, “but I felt a little bit of an outsider, because I didn’t come from Wheaton. I came from a left-wing background in a right-wing society. At that time just voting Democratic was left wing. When Kennedy was elected, people wore black armbands. But being different had its advantages, too. I felt challenged by it. You see things from a different perspective and you question how things are.”

He entered Harvard — “still left of  center, but no radical” — planning on a career in architecture. There he rediscovered art and, with the prodding of a professor, entered his artwork in contests.

Son of painters Samuel and Eleanor Himmelfarb, John Himmelfarb grew up in a household of artists in the surround of deeply wooded Winfield Township, Illinois, and made his first attempts at drawing in the corner of his father’s Halsted Street studio. Himmelfarb studied liberal arts at Harvard University, majoring in architectural sciences. In his freshman year, he enrolled in a two-dimensional design course, his first studio experience. Thereafter, along with academics, Himmelfarb was back in the studio every term of his undergraduate years. The artist remained at Harvard, this time to complete a masters program in teaching, but moved his residence to a sheep farm in Millis, Massachusetts, where he lived in a rent-free cabin in exchange for watching the sheep.

Broad Daylight Meeting (1986), more than 7 feet long and almost 5 feet high, features figures that seem gigantic in scale. Set in the tangled atmosphere that recalls the dense forests of the artist’s childhood, this ink on paper work evokes the human-to-animal kinship of the shepherd to his flock, as well as their mutual antagonism to lupine predators. Or is the affinity that between wolf and wolfman, overseen by tree gods? The ambiguity of players in this scene — colossal and close up, in a shallow space that multiplies the intensity but scatters certainty about the meanings of the confrontation — echoes in the formal elements Himmelfarb employs.

The childlike quality of images and independent identities of marks in Broad Daylight Meeting rub against one another in a sophisticated and intricate all-over composition. Recognizable representations and non-objective forms ascend in sequence. In this labyrinth that Himmelfarb has carefully constructed, complexity becomes complication, entanglement, and predicament. In its rich, knotty quandary, the monumental drawing is typical of the Meeting series, which Himmelfarb created throughout the 1980s. Himmelfarb’s art undergoes a relentless process of mining and a continuous reevaluation of content and form. A crucial part of an oeuvre that intersperses invention and reconceptualization, the oscillating procedure of walking forward and then retracing his artistic steps also knits Himmelfarb’s works together with extraordinary integration.

The artist has had a measure of success at mid-career. He has been included in group exhibitions throughout the United States since 1968, and has shown in New York since 1977. He received a fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council and two from the NEA. Still, he retains a personal distance from art centers, working in a studio in the Chicago area since 1970. And although his art is clearly founded on the compositional innovations of the Abstract Expressionists and the direct imagery of Dubuffet’s Art Brut and the Northern European CoBrAs, Himmelfarb has charted an independent and individualistic path that leads back to himself. Helen Sheridan, writing of Himmelfarb’s work of this period, called his storytelling “mythic.” The gnarled woodsman, Himmelfarb’s protagonist, is above all introspective, asking “eternal questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What shall I do?”

Note
l. Sheridan, in Meetings in the Garden p. 3.

References
Barilleaux, René Paul. Samuel Himmelfarb, Eleanor Himmelfarb, John Himmelfarb: Three Painters (exhibition catalogue). Quincy, Illinois: Quincy Art Center, 1994.

Sheridan, Helen, and Michael Bonestell. Meetings in the Garden: The Art of John Himmelfarb (exhibition catalogue). Kalamazoo, Michigan: Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, 1989.

John, in your work there always seems to be a tension between the recognizable image and pure abstraction. Is one or the other a primary concern?

I like to achieve a balance between the nonobjective design quality of the work and images of narrative quality. It doesn’t often come out as a perfect balance.

Do you start with an idea that suggests a particular imagery?

Well, out of necessity more than anything else, I find that I am not able to generate totally nonobjective forms that seem significant, or that organize themselves in a visual pattern that is satisfying to me, unless I have in the back of my mind at least some specific imagery. My work cycles from imagistic to nonobjective over a period of many years and then back again. As I work with an image I gradually use it more and more familiarly and it becomes less and less representational until I’m finally into a mode where it is either very abstract or becomes nonobjective. Beyond a certain point I have to “recharge my batteries” with images again. I either slowly work my way back into imagery, or I just make an abrupt break in my work and begin again with recognizable images.

So those writers who describe you as a social critic or engaged in social commentary are just a little bit off the mark? You’re interested in ideas and in people and you need some of these ideas working for you as an artist, but it’s the mark on the paper that’s important?

The mark on the paper is probably paramount in translating my energy into something that’ll communicate energy to other people. But as long as I’m using narrative images, my social concerns are hard to keep out of it. They just slip in naturally. I’d love to be a political artist, but I never found a way of achieving that within my visual language. I intend my work to be open and sharing, and I’ve come to see that as a political statement in itself.

It’s hard for me to see you as a social commentator, except in a very broad sense. Particularly in the Meeting series, where your images are strongest. The protagonist in those large drawings seems to be engaged in a kind of interior dialogue, rather than commenting on the outside world. The individual is involved with himself. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, the image suggests an interior struggle, an interior drama.

That’s true of the Meeting series. The images developed without an illustrative aim on my part. The original image came from the subconscious in a stream-of-consciousness manner of working. I believe I selected it to develop, and kept using it, primarily at first for its design value.

Was Arms Length the pivotal work in this series?

Arms Length was done at about that time, but the image I really used over and over again began from something that I call Meeting. I worked with it for almost a year. Then I began to interpret the image for myself because I was curious why I was so compulsive about returning to the same imagery. Of course, there were some technical reasons why I kept using it, but I felt that perhaps there were psychological or emotional reasons for returning to it. So I began to ask myself, “who are these characters and what do they mean?” For a time I tried to help other people interpret them by recounting my own steps of interpretation. I shy away from that now because I don’t want my reading, which came after the images, to be limiting to the people who want to experience the work for themselves.

But you go so far as to say that the frontal face is the protagonist and the profile view is an inner voice?

That’s an interpretation that I came up with for myself — one of many.

Your drawings of the 70s were composed of hundreds of small individual drawings. Each work appeared homogeneous when looked at as a whole; but when looked at closely, it was clear that each small drawing existed both separately and in relationship to adjacent images. As you look at a mid-70s drawing as a whole it appears a little like a field image; but as you look closer there are lots and lots of individual differences, and separate little entities exist both alone and in relationship to things on either side. Images are repeated and appear in variation. But in the Meeting series you seem to zero in on a particular image, and it is this image that is explored over and over.

In the earlier work, each piece was made up of many small marks. There was no single large image. Each mark was its own image. Sometime around 1984, the marks began to add up to larger images as I began the Meeting series. But the concern with filling the field with lots of marks is the continuity between the two periods.

How did your Boat Man series lead to the Meeting series?

JH – The Boat Man series began as an attempt to get a bolder image than I had been able to produce with the pen and ink drawings. By using a very liquid black acrylic, I was able to draw with a brush instead of a pen. Most of this work was done on raw canvas, as for example in Riding High, but I also did a group of brush and ink on paper works. After a bit of time away from that work, during which I reinterpreted the Boat Man series in a group of color paintings, I returned to the ideas begun in the brush and ink drawings.

If we push the narrative aspects of these works, in the Boat Man series you record the destruction of our technological civilization by flood. And in the Meeting series man reappears, alone, in the garden.

That’s right.

In the Boat Man series you seem to be concerned with the individual in the world and civilization as a whole, whereas in the Meeting series there is a concentration on the self that becomes paramount. There is a self-consciousness, a conscious effort to integrate or balance the disparate parts of the self that is what seems to me to be strong in your work in the 80s.

I never really saw the connection until now between the last of those black and white Boat Man paintings, which were purely botanical, and the Meeting works. Those paintings represented a resurgence of life, but not of animal or human life. In the Meeting series, the background is again foliage, but it’s only a background rather than the total subject.

Even though the garden is a background to the major image, it is still a powerful presence. Nature, as represented by the garden, is almost overwhelming. The protagonist, in spite of his gigantic head, seems barely able to hold his own against this teeming elemental world. I’ve wondered if the puzzled look that appears on some of the faces in the Meeting works doesn’t reflect this.

Perhaps. Or perhaps they are waiting for the conflict between the other elements to be resolved. At a recent show of my work at Ball State University, I talked about the self-portrait quality in a lot of my work and about how every artist’s work is a self-portrait. Whether it’s Broadway Boogie Woogie or Stella’s Protractor series, what the artist does is to some extent a self-portrait. Everything we do tells something about ourselves. My point is that doing self-portraits or work that helps an artist understand himself better is not mere self-indulgence, but is a vehicle for connecting to the rest of the world. If you can understand yourself better because of the work that you do, then you’re better able to understand, by association, other people. People can look at an artist’s work and not only learn something about the artist but, if they put themselves in the artist’s shoes as they look at the work and try to figure out what it means to them, they may learn something about themselves. That also allows them to become more understanding of the rest of the world. So, for the artist, the self-portrait can be a path to a larger vision.

It can also be a little scary. You might see a part of yourself you don’t know. That kind of discovery can be frightening, especially when you discover things that don’t fit your safe, comfortable, everyday image of yourself.

Your preconceived image of yourself. Well it all comes down to describing one’s self in another way and that’s with the visual design. The image is still for me just a vehicle for getting on the page a design that reflects my energy map of the world. It’s a way of translating the way I feel about the world into a pattern. When somebody else reads it, even if they don’t see the imagery, they can respond to the energy of the design.

That’s very true of your large scale works. Anyone seeing these works will be struck by the force of the total design, even though they might not immediately see the particular images. Obviously the composition engages the viewer on a very powerful emotional level.

Well that’s what I hope people take away from seeing the work. It’s not the specific interpretation of this image or that image which is important in enjoying the work. If a work doesn’t reach people just as a composition of visual elements, then it is not successful in my book. I don’t consider all of my work successful by this measure, but sometimes the work seems interesting enough to be allowed to stand in spite of its flaws.

As I look at your most recent works, they appear to be more abstract. Do you think you are coming to the end of the Meeting series and moving in a new direction?

I seem to be going in a couple of directions at once. One focuses on images from the Meeting series. For example, I may select the single face and concentrate on that in a large painting. Another group of images has popped up in monoprints and little drawings and etchings. In these there is a whole cast of characters. If you want to continue with our basic interpretation, you can call them additional inner voices.

Man beset by personal devils?

They could just be more of the inner voices, or you can say that they give a broader picture of the world. I’m also working on a large drawing, Forest Free Fall, in which I take that cast of characters up to a larger scale for the first time. I’ve been experimenting with this kind of thing over the last four years, here and there in a single work and always on a fairly moderate scale. This kind of work will probably continue. All of these works incorporate some kind of recognizable image. But some of the newer paintings take the markmaking from the large heads of the Meeting series and build a new vocabulary of forms. These forms don’t relate directly to the Meeting imagery in anything but the organic quality of the marks.

So the two directions you mention are exactly opposite, one is toward increased figuration and the other toward pure abstraction?

We referred to those divergent interests at the beginning of this interview, and it’s happened before in my work. The paintings that started the Boat Man series began as purely nonobjective markmaking. Then a story began to emerge with the figure in the boat. But even those paintings became almost nonobjective at certain points. I always wanted to go back to nonobjectivity but couldn’t find a way. Somehow working with a primed canvas and color gave me a way back without duplicating what I’d done before. My new studio has made a big difference. I’ve got the space to go in several directions at once. Here I can work on something that’s nonobjective on the same day that I’m working on a painting that’s still one of the heads or a drawing that incorporates seven or eight figures.

So you can begin a work and if you run into trouble you can let the ideas percolate for a while before you go on?

I don’t have to finish anything right away. In my previous studio I couldn’t work on anything else until I had finished what was out because I didn’t have any other space. If I put an unfinished work away I was afraid I’d never get it out again.

Do you find you’re doing more large scale things now that you have this big studio?

I’m doing more work, period. I think I’m also doing more large scale work. I’m certainly doing more large paintings than I did before.

Let’s talk about the paintings. Your large drawings seem to have evolved naturally from the kind of stream-of-consciousness markmaking you were doing at an earlier stage. How has painting changed your work? Have you lost spontaneity?

I try to maintain the spontaneous quality of the drawings. In paintings I did in the early 70s I would draw on the canvas in the same way that I draw on paper. I wouldn’t have a sketch. I would just start drawing whatever came into my head.

Can you give some examples?

Filming of Sunny Days is a good example. The small painting, Dobb’s Ferry, was done that way. Although the style’s quite different, Red Dog, Yellow Dog, is the same technique.

You draw the images and then fill in color?

Yes. My drawing style has changed, but the idea of filling everything up and keeping a flat design has been almost constant. Only in an occasional piece in the past is there an opening up, a willingness to allow open spaces. This is also true of the new paintings I call “Non-Objective.” There are recognizable images that can be identified, but there is no attempt to be illusionistic, or to portray light and shadow, roundness or depth. Through most of my work I make an effort to keep a flat design because I want to make it clear that, even though I’m using recognizable images, I’m not competing with the real thing. What I’m doing is creating designs, even though I need imagery to make those designs . Not only was the design flat, but I used the paint in a very flat way. I’d put down the line quality and then I’d fill in flat areas and color it much like pop artists.

This was in the early 70s?

Yes. Then in the late 70s I did some paintings where I didn’t draw things out first. In these I just began painting and the images developed as I painted. The color wasn’t so flat and it became much more developed on the surface. It was a pretty important group of works, even though it didn’t last for more than a year, because it led to the development of the large figures that later emerged in my drawings and paintings. I was drawing with the paint rather than using the paint just as a skin to fill in the structure.

And this painterly, gestural markmaking was very different from the fine linear quality of your 70s drawings?

Movements generated by the gesture became an extension of the color, whereas in the Meeting series I drew first with the darker value of the paint, such as a blue or black, and then built color out from that. The color is an extension of the gesture in the Meeting series. I try to build the color with gesture rather than having it just be a flat surface, but the gesture is controlled by the original drawing I’ve put down. It has to build upon the marks that I’ve put down. The first paintings I did in this way started out with a more systematic approach. I knew ahead of time that I was going to use dark blue first, and then yellows, and then oranges and reds, and maybe green. There was a working order in my approach, much as a series like Red Dog, Yellow Dog had a system where I drew and then filled in paint. In the paintings of 1976, like Red Dog, Yellow Dog, I drew with a pen. In paintings from the Meeting series, like Low Intensity Conflict, I put down the blue structure first and built up the color within that structure, even though I was making marks instead of flat areas of color. Now I’ve begun, as in 1978-79, to modulate the color more, rather than using color that comes right out of the jar. There’s also more development in the painting itself. I don’t always stay within the general structure that I had when I first painted the black or blue lines. In my recent “Non-Objective” paintings, the color is again like an architectural skin, but in these the color helps to define the drawing in a way that it had not in earlier works.

Do surprises emerge?

Yes. The colors change a lot. I have no preconceptions about color. One day the painting might be predominately red and yellow, and then I suddenly have the urge to move it in a different direction. One recent painting is a pastel pink and green, but I need to work on it some more.

So the image in your work provides the basic structure that informs the painting all through its development?

Yes.

Your work has always seemed energetic and intense, rather than reflective.

Well, in a Jake Berthot or John Dilg painting everything is underneath, and the surface is very calm and quiet. Once you stand and look at the painting long enough, that underlying energy comes through. It doesn’t hit you when you first walk by.

But with your own work, you’re impatient. You want to engage the viewer immediately.

That’s the way I am as a person. I’m much more likely to come up and speak to somebody immediately than I am to be cautious and wait to find out what a person is like before I open up at all. Of course, that gets me in trouble sometimes.

In another of your interviews, you said it was important for you to engage the public, to communicate with people.

I have bent over backwards to be helpful in giving some clues for people who are baffled by my work so they can more easily get something out of it. Yet I don’t want to take away the experience of coming to understand a work on one’s own. I try to find a balance between being open enough to help people take the first step, without providing so many clues that there is no mystery for the viewer.

Are you bothered by what might be called over-interpretation by people who really want to read your paintings as narratives?

I think that’s fine as long as people invent their own and don’t depend on me to provide them.

Or expect that there is one right interpretation of your paintings?

There is no one right answer. The same is true when we try to interpret the world at large. There are lots of different ways of looking at it.

But the images do have some connection with you?

Yes, but when I interpret one of my images I’m only somewhat better prepared to do so than anyone else because I have a few more insights into what is happening in my life. It’s an after-the-fact interpretation. I began interpreting the Meeting series only three or four years after I made the first one. I have no idea what I was thinking about back in 1982 when I did Meeting. I don’t remember exactly where I was or what I was doing. I could try to remember, but I’m not that curious.

Those childlike, rough-featured heads had nothing to do with your children’s drawings because they were in your work long before you had children?

I think they go back to my own childhood. I grew up with animals we kept as family pets, and then there were lots of animals out in the woods where we lived, and of course all the stuffed animals that I had. Children just have a natural fascination with beasts. As a child I drew lots of animals.

You aren’t trying to be provocative or to co-opt the energy of the primitive or art brut?

Well, those were certainly very strong influences on me, and I think that was the kind of energy I responded to — Masson, Jackson Pollock, and Dubuffet. I can understand the fascination of European artists with the so-called primitive arts in the early part of the 20th century. The work of Henri Rousseau, Mark Tobey’s white writing and his fascination with the calligraphy of the East were also early influences on me. These, together, describe the kind of energy in which I’ve always been interested. The public with whom I’m trying to communicate is a group of people curious enough to go to see art and anxious to integrate new ideas and experiences into their lives. Not necessarily people who are highly educated in the latest twist and turn of contemporary art movements. I’m not trying to speak exclusively to people who understand all the ins and outs of minimalism, postmodernism, neogeo, and all those things.

All you ask is a kind of openness?

Right. You don’t have to know a lot, just be curious and willing to look at new things without feeling threatened by them. If you can get something from it, that’s great. If you’re puzzled but you don’t turn it off, you might come back a few years later and see some of my work again. Hopefully, in your subconscious, it will have been absorbed somewhat so you can get a little more from it the second time.

What about collectors?

I’m not specifically painting for people who collect art history. There is an audience that is more interested in art as historical phenomena. They want to own art in the same way some people want to own stamps. They want to have an example of this or that in their collection because it is the first work to accomplish some task identified by an art historian. Whether it is a great work of art is beside the point for this collector. If my work takes on historical significance, that’s fine. I’m not trying to avoid that, but I’m not trying to figure out what the next step in contemporary art will be, or to do something that will secure me a place in history as the first artist ever to do this or that. That’s just not enough to drive me. I enjoy thinking about those things, and I have a million clever ideas in my head on ways to respond to changes and developments that would be fun if I had the time. Sort of light entertainment for myself. But that’s not what makes me get up in the morning. I don’t have this drive to figure out what is going to make me a famous artist. The drive I have seems to come from something internal.

I know how your early discipline as a musician has helped you as an artist because it instilled the habit of regular working hours. But I wonder if there are other influences. So many of your early linear drawings read like music. The viewer moves sequentially from image to image, from left to right. Was that deliberate?

Yes. Many were done in response to music. Very often I work with music as another way of translating energy. I pick up on a musical energy and try to move with that. The movement of my fingers in making the drawing becomes a kind of dance. Now, in the large scale work, the total body becomes involved in making a gesture.

All those individual marks that you were making in the early drawings are little notations that read almost like the separate notes in music. These “notes” could exist as separate entities, but arranged together in a particular way they make up the composition. In your recent works, however, you seem to be dealing with a very limited number of “notes,” exploring much more fully the various nuances that are possible. How do you achieve coherence?

Well, I do think two things are happening at the same time. There’s the motor-driven markmaking, and right behind it is the self-conscious voice evaluating what is happening and trying to inform the hand about what ought to happen next.

What many people don’t understand about the automatic writing technique is that while the conscious mind may not be controlling the hand, it’s right there and, at least, telling the hand when to stop.

It tells you when to stop, and it evaluates what has just happened and tries to influence what is about to happen, without interfering with the creative flow. It might be saying, “OK, that was pretty dense in there, relax and open up a bit. AII those marks seem to be arching upwards, you need something to pull it down again.” It happens so rapidly that interaction between the self-conscious artist mind and the hand that’s just trying to do its own thing.

How was making the early black and white drawings different?

That was rapid fire too. But because there was just a single line being dealt with at a time, I could just keep going and mistakes were more easily overcome. The separate marks didn’t have as large an impact on the total composition. If a line went off in the wrong direction, it wasn’t going to be a very large mistake because the size was so small. Now the marks are much bigger and I move more slowly. It takes a little more time for talk between the automatic movement of the arm and the rational response to the movement.

But if you make a mistake, it’s a big one.

Exactly. That’s a big difference. But I think that partly because of previous success and partly because of personal development that comes with age, I feel more self-confident and willing to take the risks involved with the larger marks and larger strokes. The new paintings are a kind of liberation from risk because I can keep redoing them. With the drawings, the esthetic is really dependent upon the idea that you don’t make any big mistakes.

Perhaps that’s why your drawings have such a marvelous spontaneous quality.

Making them is a little like a performance. You can play a violin concerto and muck a bar here and there and still have a great performance. That’s true of some of these drawings. If you really want to get finicky, as I usually do, there are little passages that aren’t quite right. The drawing may still be worth looking at, even though it’s not perfect. For instance, there was a big mistake in Big Boy, but I decided the drawing was so important to me that I would correct it artificially by using a white acrylic paint to cover up the mistake.

Do you discover your mistakes immediately?

Usually I’m quickly aware of them, but not always. Sometimes I have to put a piece up on the wall to find a mistake. The Big Boy mistake was such a big one that I knew it while I was making it. I was using my largest Japanese brush on the face and I just flicked my wrist the wrong way. I ended up with a huge geometrically perfect circle that popped right off the sheet because it was so different from everything else. I don’t know how it happened, whether I lost my concentration or got overly excited about the movement without considering the result.

What can you do to reduce the risk?

I sometimes take strips of black paper cut in the shape of marks and pin them up in areas where I think additional marks might be of some help. Then I stand back and look at the effect. It reduces some of the risk.

There would have to be some aids with a technique like yours. It’s interesting to hear about some of the tricks. It would be fun to have you work on a drawing right in the middle of the gallery during the exhibition.

I’ve done that a number of times as a visiting artist. I’ve gone into a classroom, rolled out a big sheet on the floor, and talked about what I’m doing while I do it.

We’ve talked a lot about your large scale works, but what about the works that go beyond large? For example, Meeting in the Attic is almost 32 feet long. Why so big?

I was interested in the sense of importance that is given to something by increasing its scale. The person looking at it says, ‘”Hey, look at this,” because you’ve made it so big. And, for me, working on that monumental scale brings up the level of adrenalin in a way that’s hard to duplicate on a smaller scale.

Any surprises in moving to that scale?

When I’ve been working with a theme in a particular way for a while, it’s helpful to make a change. Say I’ve been working with an image in the horizontal, and I turn it vertical or change the dimension in some other way. The changes that have to take place usually force a really creative solution. It forces me out of a set pattern of thinking about the image.

Such a change energizes your image?

Yes. I’m forced to reinterpret it in a radical way by the change in scale or dimension. Also, because I had worked with the Meeting theme for such a long time, I felt I was ready to make a major statement.

But you haven’t felt the need to do it again?

I think, in the last year or so, the demands of moving my studio and getting some new work done for shows have prevented that. But as I laid out the studio, I did it in such a way that it would be easy for me to work on that scale again. I certainly intend to. I have different ideas of images that I’d like to use, but I haven’t gotten to the point where I have to do it yet or where I feel ready to do it. In my studio I have the ability to do something that’s 50 feet wide and still put it up on the wall. I’ve also considered using several bands of paper, so that instead of a drawing that’s 7-1/2′ by 32′ it could be 15′ by 32′ on two sheets. I’ve also begun a shift to black enamel on canvas as a substitute for the very large drawings. This will remove some of the headaches of exhibiting such large sheets of paper.

It’s amazing how much continuity there is in what you did 15 years ago and what you’re doing now.

It’s particularly surprising because when I look at one piece at a time it seems like I’m going off in a million directions. But when I look at the work over a 15 or 20 year period, it’s instructive to me to see how much has remained the same.

One purpose of this retrospective is to show that continuity between your beginnings and the present.

I can show you drawings of plants and flowers that I was doing in 1968 that are very reminiscent of the foliage I’m doing now. To think that I’m coming back to that, although on a much larger scale and with different tools. Sometimes at my mother’s house I discover something I drew as a child, say on a tile I did in kindergarten. I look at it and suddenly say, “Oh, I’m still making those shapes.” It’s just incredible to me.

“Meetings in the Garden” is a circulating retrospective of 50 paintings, prints, and drawings produced by Chicago artist John Himmelfarb between the early 1970s and the present. Organized by the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the exhibit will occupy the KIA Main, West and North Galleries from September 5 through October 15. It will later circulate to three other museums.

The show’s title is taken from a multi-media series Himmelfarb began in the early 1980s describing a close confrontation between two or three people and animals in a wild area. Typical is Himmelfarb’s painting, “Low Intensity Conflict” in which the onlooker is confronted by the snout of a wild boar, poking through dense and prickly foliage. Large human eyes seem to float in the corner, perhaps belonging to the omniscient artist. Brush strokes are strident, pulsing everywhere on the painting’s surface, setting up conflicting energy fields. The colors are raw: red reds, synthetic blues and greens, undiluted yellows. The painting seems to devour the onlooker with its primitive ferocity.

But Himmelfarb is not a primitive. He was born in Chicago in 1946 to two artists: Samuel Himmelfarb, a professional painter and designer, and Eleanor Himmelfarb whose own art work explores the relationship between man and nature. Samuel Himmelfarb designed their home in rural Winfield, Illinois, in a location surrounded by woods. Strongly influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie architecture, the home was filled with paintings, books, and art conversations. Himmelfarb’s parents took him with them whenever they went to look at art. Later Himmelfarb went to Harvard University, receiving an A.B. degree in 1968 in urban design, and a M.A.T. degree in art education in 1970.

Where then did his preoccupation with animals in the wild come from? Himmelfarb speculates, “l think they go back to my own childhood. I grew up with animals we kept as family  pets (a donkey, goat, and dog), then there were lots of animals out in the woods where we lived, and of course all the stuffed animals that I had.” Because of the relative isolation of their home, for play Himmelfarb relied a lot on himself, his animal friends, and the woods.

Ready or not — the winter season at the Art Gallery opens with an exhibition that invites your imagination to explore the orchestration of large scale black and white drawings, and acrylics on canvas by Chicago artist, John Himmelfarb. For the viewer, the works may at first appear bewildering and whimsical in content, but do not be surprised to find yourself engulfed in a veritable symphony of visual imagery with countless scores of symbols and fantasy stories. Himmelfarb’s works herald the notion of the artist as translator, supporting many of the art dictums that motivated abstract expressionism and the arousing energizing forces of art brut with immediacy and rawness, each magically symbolizing a theme, but the metaphor is left up to the individual observer to decipher.

Himmelfarb graduated from Harvard in 1968, where he took some basic design courses and independent study related to art within his study for urban planning. He stayed on at Harvard to complete a masters of teaching degree in 1970. His commitment to his art led to the mastery of painting, printmaking, drafting, ceramic sculpture, and book illustration.

The first artist I ever met was Raphael Beck. My parents had just moved into a new house on Willow Street in Lockport, New York, the county seat of Niagara County. On the same block of relatively large houses and within easy tricycling distance lived Mr. Beck. This was 1942 and I was four years old and Mr. Beck was about 84, he was even older than my grandmother. Both my grandmother and my mother had known him since they were born. The house had huge verandahs almost covered with bushes. It was the only somewhat run-down house in the neighborhood. In back of the house was a big barn where I often met Mr. Beck tottering around among thousands of canvases, looking for something. He wasn’t painting much in those days, right before he died, but he was still active and people were still buying his work, so he would often have occasion to look for one or the other. While I was there, he showed me his work. I seem to remember large historical scenes (but I may have seen these later in the Bank where there were his murals about the opening, in 1828, of the Erie Barge Canal), a number of portraits of women and some children, quite a few still lives, and a number of self-portraits and landscapes, such as Willow Street in the Snow probably painted in about 1895. The man was a legend in his own time, a man whom his daughter later told me never had to take in students except once in the middle of the Depression, and always supported himself on his work as a fine artist. He also designed commemorative placques the most famous of which was minted for the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901. He maintained his studio for many years in Buffalo, about 25 miles due South, and it was often hailed as the best studio between Chicago and New York. I knew him for the last four years of his life and during that time I became a student of Olivia McConnell, one of his students, a practice I continued every Saturday morning for several years, engrossing myself in the smell of varnish and turpentine and discovering the mysteries of linoleum cutting and clay modeling. Mr. Beck’s father was a famous artist in Philadelphia and so was his aunt, but none of his children or grandchildren ever took brush in hand.

Forty years later, I met John Himmelfarb who is about eight years younger than l, but who reminds me of Raphael Beck. John Himmelfarb is also an hereditary artist, since both of his parents were artists and the family pasttimes involved art and aesthetic discussions and the family vacations were spent in museums of modern art in this country and abroad. Since my childhood, I have met a few hundred artists, a few of whom are children of artists, but none of these, even, put me in mind of the first artist in my life as strongly. I met John Himmelfarb through my acquaintance with the brother of a close friend of mine who met John when John was at Harvard or at any rate when he was still around Boston. Relatively few artists have ever gone to Harvard since they have no fine arts program. John thought he wanted to go into city planning or architecture and perhaps even teach anthropology. Then one of his teachers asked him if he had ever thought of becoming an artist:

And I said, “No.” To myself I said, “Well, you don’t decide to become an artist. Becoming an artist is something that happens to you. It’s out of your control. You hear voices from above and trumpets and somebody taps you on the shoulder and says, ‘You’re an artist.’  …. The fact that he brought it up made it seem like a possible choice, like “Why not?” I wrote a proposal for the department in design language on the suggestion of this same teacher and was in my junior year (1967), able to draw several hours a day and get credit for it …. I was being taken seriously by someone other than my family. I was being critiqued on an adult level. I found I was extremely happy spending my time that way. It clicked. That was the bell as far as I was concerned.¹

From then on, Himmelfarb has been working steadily and relatively consistently as an artist, not becoming a professional teacher, but being a professional artist. He has showed and sold his work on an onward and upward scale since his first show the first year in Millis , Massachusetts where he was working part-time as a shepherd. He has also chosen to stick to his native Chicago, although he lives in Oak Park, the first Western suburb rather than out in the woods where his parents built their house and did much of their work. While he has sold and showed consistently, according to his own report in a wonderful interview by Matthew Rose published in Arts, he has consciously had a long-term strategy. Accordingly, he makes it his business to cultivate the vast and often overlooked reaches of the provincial art centers, having shows in Davenport and Omaha as well as in Chicago and New York, keeping his hand in wherever he’s welcomed. His position in Chicago, near the center of the United States, makes it relatively easy to stay in touch with everything, but even so he doesn’t do it all the time. He could probably have many more shows but he feels that he’s proceeding along well and getting more and more attention all the time. This exhibition in Davenport is the largest show of his works ever mounted, and although it is not complete (since there are no pictures with colors in them, whether drawings or paintings) it does provide a view of Himmelfarb’s production over a period of about ten years as a mid-career survey of a very interesting artist.

In preparation for writing this essay, I talked with John Himmelfarb on tape and transcribed his part of the conversation:

I can remember the Museum of Modern Art as a young child. My parents tended to go for the contemporary art rather than go through all the Renaissance paintings …. Kandinsky, Picasso, Matisse, DeKooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Appel …. In the last fifteen years one of my favorites is Philip Guston after he came back to his imagery. I like the work of a friend of mine out at the University of Iowa, John Dilg. I like Tom Otterness’s sculpture, but I don’t keep up with the art magazines …. For most of my life I’ve been committed to things being formally organized. I tend to like eccentric art, like Dubuffet, who has his own structure, his own way of doing it. ²

His art can, and sometimes is, also described as eccentric in the sense that although he is aware of the whole history of modern art, he doesn’t precisely follow in anyone’s footsteps. He is a loner, possibly an echo of his largely solitary boyhood in rural Illinois, but more importantly an indication of his essential independence of mind. Himmelfarb makes art that is evidently good, and while one is occasionally reminded of another artist, it is usually more coincidental than it is important. For example, his line treatment reminds me strongly of Saul Steinberg’s but when I asked him about this he remarked that his parents must have had a book of Steinberg around the house. Actually Himmelfarb’s line is his own. “For years I only trusted my intuition, ” he said in our talk, “I didn’t think my rational powers of thought were up to snuff for a national level of work and I only trusted my work on an unconscious level.” In a sense, this exhibition of his black drawings and paintings is a mark of a new maturity, a time when Himmelfarb feels confident to pursue one idea instead of simply exploiting his intuition in what he refers to [as] a stream of consciousness or automatic writing mode in which much of the work in this show was done — “If I make a squiggle that looks like a nose, then I may make the rest of the face.” This is not to say, however, that the “automatic” work is inferior to his “rational” work. It is really all of a piece, and if there is a break in the work, it is more a mere anecdote than an indication of a radical change. Artists usually become more confident as they grow older, and Himmelfarb is no exception in this respect. The way in which he is exceptional is that he has been doing consistent, good work for more than ten years without being drawn into the commercial vortex in which so many young artists have either flourished or perished during the same period of time.

As we look at this large selection of genial drawings and paintings we are bound to acknowledge intelligence and wit and persistence, as well as good craftsmanship, but if that’s all there is, then there are artists in every small town almost who are just as good. But that’s not all there is. Like a poet who’s very good, a work of Himmelfarb’s can sum up existence in a few hundred lines. I am thinking particularly of the mute and not even narrative series of 1979 including such works as Patterns Linked, Thought Without Words, or The Actuality. Here is a kind of luscious brickwork forming walls that approximate the suggestiveness of spoken words without imitating or implying any other language than their own. Then there are the huge mural-like works such as Stream on Streamers of 1978, and other smaller ones which have a tendency to look big because they contain so much precise detail. “In making my big eight foot long pieces,” he said, “I was consciously jealous of novelists because they can get my attention for days, I never come up for air. You can walk past a painting in thirty or forty seconds or less. I wanted to create something that you could look at for a long time.” What’s interesting in this large body of work, is the persistence of the illusion that there is a story behind, within or in front of the picture; but even with great care, in most of these pictures there is a large statement of the multiplicity of everything, but no story, plot or ready reference.

In about 1971, Himmelfarb made some dogs that look a bit like Keith Haring’s designs, done with thick brush and ink (Haring started work in about 1980 with thick white chalk on black). And in the ’80s Himmelfarb turned to brush with ink — he uses India ink mixed with water in various proportions — to make pictures that bear no relation to current fashions and which, however, clearly do tell a story. In ’81-2 he made a long series which has only an informal title “Boat Man or the History of the World.” I asked him to tell the story in a sentence:

It’s life emerging out of the sea, beginning life forms, the coming together of social life forms of some sort, male & female, Adam & Eve, establishing a household and then somehow the beginning of civilization, and man sets out with a bunch of his possessions on an adventure of some sort, with exuberance, and it could be read on a personal level also — it’s being produced on a personal level — he acquires more and more and more, the boat gets weighed down more and more in the paintings, gradually, here’s the boat and here’s the figure with all the stuff from my studio, cameras and ladders and junk, often there’s somebody in the water who doesn’t find space on the boat, he’s going down, there’s his head and his hand but he’s weighed down so much that he’s below the picture plane, it’s dark and stormy, he’s bobbing in the water looking back at his boat, then several pictures of just flotsam and jetsam then the clearing of the skies after the flood or whatever catastrophe, and finally a biological resurgence, flowers, no animals, life without the implication of human life.

This epic series, meaning that in some sense it includes almost everything there is, sums up Himmelfarb’s earlier, more tacit, drawings, but it does so in a resolutely non-verbal way. Even if you know the story you may miss parts of it and you will almost certainly bring to it bits of the story of your own life which the artist did not know he knew. It doesn’t affect the view of the work to know the story — you still see a density of line and stroke that remind one of the growth of jungles, perhaps, or the eternal motion of the sea — experiences, I feel bound to remark, that not all Americans have shared. Finally these works remind one of whatever one knows of the world in its multifariousness.

The latest works in the show present an obscure figuration, a face or two, maybe a dog or bird, but the artist tells me that these are “a story of inner voices. There’s a protagonist who’s staring straight out and there’s a profile which is a critical inner voice and there’s often a dog which is a more positive inner voice, my inner dog.” These works have a baroque brashness appropriate to these times, and they share something with Himmelfarb’s new paintings, a freer yet more premeditated style. One hopes that the inner voices counsel him to courage and perseverance.

Black marks are often used by artists who are searching, who haven’t time to play with colors. As in black and white photography, shape and line predominate the seductiveness of color. This is not to say that black and white works are tentative or immature — almost all artists do work in black, often at the height of their artistic powers. But as a palpable sign of searching, Himmelfarb’s still youthful blacks on whites display much mastery and the promise of large future developments. It is good to summarize part of one’s life from time to time, and this exhibition in Iowa provides a wonderful overview of John Himmelfarb’s work so far.

Frederick Ted Castle
New York, November 24, 1985

Notes

¹ Matthew Rose, “An Interview with John Himmelfarb,” Arts Magazine [1985].

² All other quotes in this essay come from my otherwise unpublished interview with John Himmelfarb, New York, November, 1985. F.T.C.

Frederick Ted Castle is a poet, philosopher, novelist & art critic living in New York. His first book Anticipation is available from bookstores and another novel, Gilbert Green, will be published in April 1986, both from McPherson & Co.

Few artists working today command the authority of orchestrating large scale drawings of black on white. John Himmelfarb, a Chicago-based artist, is one exception. Himmelfarb can draw and continues to do so even while the bulk of the art world views the ancient activity as “studies” or “sketches.” And while many artists do come to drawing to work out visual ideas, few have given the medium a concentrated effort. Perhaps because drawing, like writing, is a deceptively difficult means of communication. Simplifying form and composition in strict black and white has been left for those with both patience and endurance; most have left the black and white world for one built out of color, for things bright.

Himmelfarb has built a substantial part of his career as an artist on drawing and painting black on white. While he also paints (in color) as much as he draws, his most recent work concentrates on large scale brush and ink drawings on paper, two of which are included in the Monumental Drawings Show at the Brooklyn Museum this September (Giant’s Meeting, 1985, and Dream Meeting, 1986.) In addition, his drawings, paintings, prints and monoprints will be shown at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery and John Nichols Printmakers (New York City) this October. The work has marked a period in Himmelfarb’s career where the lines of his earlier work have found a major presence in what has become known as his “Meeting Series.”

Himmelfarb began drawing as a child in the rural suburbs outside of Chicago. With both his parents artists, he grew up in a house full of art and a sense of visual possibility. He wandered the woods surrounding his home. He had animals as both friends and confidants, and perhaps it was there in the forest he discovered the variety of patterns in nature — its peculiar architecture that has translated into a major presence in his work, the overlapping and shifting lines and shapes of plants and animals (and their natures) moving over and against each other, creating a kind of secret language. And while there has always been a narrative element, Himmelfarb’s work contains no beginnings, middles or ends.

In the late 1970s, Himmelfarb created a body of large eight-foot drawings composed of row upon row of sweeping calligraphic characters and scenes (Stream On Streamers 1978). The work reads as an epic social satire on the course of civilization, but without plot, narration or clear direct reference. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, there is the consciousness of translator in this body of work. The microcosms are like phantasmagorias spilled from a child’s hand, but laced with both a clear steady vision, and a mastery of pen and ink. Himmelfarb’s concern for language led to an elaborate visual vocabulary much like hieroglyphics. What followed in the next several years, however, was a slow thickening of his imagery into a faster and more direct art.

What was once millions of characters emerged into a meeting of two — usually animals or people — in confrontation. A third — often a protective, sometimes snarling dog — intercepted. These became the “Meetings;” Himmelfarb pushed the image into paintings and prints as well as drawings. The series probably found its impetus in the small brush and ink, Arms Length. This is an “automatic” drawing of two animals in confrontation; one, a sitting dog protectively guarding what appears to be a tunnel, while in the foreground a dog-man figure extends an arm, entreating passage.

Himmelfarb, who now lives in suburban Oak Park just outside Chicago, in some ways foreshadowed the neo-expressionistic lines of graffiti writers working in the streets in the 1970s and early 1980s. He makes a generational bridge (Himmelfarb is forty) between artists like Alichinsky, DuBuffet, de Kooning, Kline and Pollack and people like Haring, Basquiat and the German A.R. Penck. Himmelfarb’s work, however, has always been complex and full unlike the latter artists, combining both representational worlds with abstract ones all washed in a dream complex.

His middle 1980s work included Jungle Tonight and Sealed Lips, both “automatic” in execution, both in brush and ink and closer to a more charged and enlightened visual field. What makes these pieces special is the balance struck in the mesh of black lines on a white ground. There is no painting over and no rubbing out. A mishap in the execution ruins the work; in some ways the works become direct reflections of that part of the brain that meets the hands and the eyes. And in this sense they bear relation to Japanese brush drawings. Here, too, there is satori.

Giant’s Meeting was drawn on the floor of Himmelfarb’s studio. In talking about making such a large brush and ink drawing, Himmelfarb said he had to be careful he didn’t get ink on his socks. The piece, like its sister, Underwater Meeting, portends similar imagery — a full-faced figure within a wooded space confronted by a profile — an intruder — as a dog intercepts. What is accomplished, besides the remarkable control of the medium, is the ability to unify both idea and image in scale. His theme of confrontation suggests aspects and problems that are of and bigger than the self. Self-portraiture has always taken on meaning in scale, but here sheer size and energy of line combines both aggression and a sense of humor. Thick lips and wobbly pointed teeth seem to be gateways to the unconscious. The skin is rough, the sensuousity primitive and yet quite self-aware. In all of the “Meetings,” the dog functions as a guardian but also as a keeper of the middle; he is a mood indicator as well as best friend and worst enemy. In Underwater Meeting, the dog is something of a wild boar, its teeth pointed forward  and menacing, almost by force of its breath. The profile is always the target of this reception, and one is led to believe he embodies the darker and less obvious set of negatives in this dynamic polarity. And there are other polarities here too: the tension between animal and vegetable, nature and culture, concentration and distraction, black over white. In many ways these characters with their teeth and vibrating sense of being-in-the-world also seem to be at once in and of the forest, facing off, poised somewhere near the juncture of nature and spirit.

The confrontations also imbue a continuing perception of language. These dramatic one act meetings speak as silence and noise rush in. There is a calm anxiety permeating the field while at the same time a heightened sense of being follows. Like most explorations. the “Meeting” series slowly turns over each and every stone along the way. And in that sense, the series insures Himmelfarb’s adjustment, focus and careful probe of that anxiety.

The exhibition of prints and drawings by Chicago artist, John Himmelfarb, spans from 1970 to 1985. What is particularly gratifying is to be able to observe the subtle growth in an artist Is work whose first mature pieces already bore his unmistakable signature. He has maintained his enthusiasm over this 15-year period and still novel concepts emerge to surprise us.

Himmelfarb is an original thinker and a prolific maker of art. His Oak Park, Illinois home is literally filled with his paintings, ceramics, prints and drawings. Himmelfarb cannot be classified as an advocate of any particular medium, but more in the role of a Renaissance artist who would be comfortable working in many techniques. However, it is his prints and drawings that are the subject of this retrospective examination.

The immediate impact of Himmelfarb’s work might be interpreted as untrained, an unsophisticated attempt at image making. Nothing could be further from the truth. When we examine even the earliest drawings in this exhibit, it is apparent that an aware-sensibility to the power of visual communication is present.

It is even more confirmed when some biography is revealed. Himmelfarb comes from a family of artists; his father, Samuel, and mother, Eleanor, both being painters. Eleanor Himmelfarb is still quite active in the arts; her colorful and energetic canvases show the lessons learned from the Abstract Expressionists as well as insights shared with her own family. Her advice and experience are essential tools to John and her counsel continues to assist in providing feedback and criticism. John himself began at quite an early age to exhibit his own artwork and through family trips to museums and galleries both here and abroad he developed a sophisticated sensibility towards line and shape.

His training at Harvard was a complete liberal arts education rather than the unbalanced approach of concentrating on one area of expertise and ignoring all others. One of the areas John studied was urban planning with the youthful intent of improving the world he inhabited. As Derek Gutherie so aptly notes in a foreword to The Family Dog, A Book of John Himmelfarb Drawings (1973), “(the) movement from macrocosm to microcosm and back again is essential to Himmelfarb’s vision and demands a corresponding agility from the viewer.” We can readily see this attitude of encompassing the whole versus the singular again and again in the work. It comes from an overwhelming interest in the world and all of its many aspects. John has a myriad of interests — Chinese calligraphy, Norse mythology, 20th century literature, and classical music, to name a few. He is a prolific reader, and often his titles betray his literary sources, one such book being Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The power he imbues to his line drawings arises from the different influences on his thinking, and his expanded sense of the world.

It is this awareness of the power of line that is first revealed in these earlier works where the recognizable outlines of the rocky landscape become manifest. These were the scenes from the family’s annual summer trips to Madeline Island in Lake Superior. They were also the seminal sketches which would take on even greater importance in his work in the next few years. The drawings and prints done in 1975-1978 can best be likened to the ancient cuneiform writings of the Sumerian empire, or even to the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians. In both cases, the pictures displayed on the clay tablets or on the walls were about a specific narrative which made up a larger social history. Similarly, with Himmelfarb’s work at this time we try to link one image to the next to develop a definition or saga, but we find the meaning obscured in our inability to break his code and translate it. The visual message does become clearer as we cease to impose a known system upon it and allow the work’s complexities to reveal the art to us. The language of such pieces as 3/22/76 and Early Riser, are interdependent and draw from one another. There is energy in Himmelfarb’s line. It is subconscious, drawn from his life experiences, but it is always controlled.

There is unmistakable humor in his work. One cannot look at his busy drawings and prints without smiling or sometimes even laughing. In truth, the inner relations of these complex drawings show “creatures” revealing themselves again and again, as well as intentional scenarios being acted out in the most innocent of situations. Tilted cities and undefinable urban environments take form. His characters, who might be the subject of a pictographic drawing, are part of the modern world or even of a separate world of their own. In one of the exhibited drawings from the mid-1970’s, 2/28/78, this hieroglyphic alphabet is done in a series of vertical columns which must be read as a book and then deciphered for a full understanding. Other pieces, such as 7/15/76, seemingly show a world gone haywire. This urban map explodes with activity as action occurs with no real sense of order. It necessitates that the viewer be willing to develop order from this chaos, and that means one must be willing to take their time to “see” the work from edge to edge.

As the work demonstrates, the viewer’s time was an essential element when dealing with the work up to 1979. In this next critical period Himmelfarb was preparing for his first one-person show in New York at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery. This event was a major and long-awaited debut in his development as an artist. Faced with dealing with the demands of an audience rather than the truth of his vision, he produced a group of stark, black paintings and drawings. These are intense works which show frustration and tension, but are also growth towards a shift away from the playfulness of his earlier pieces. After 1980, Himmelfarb’s work takes on a seriousness which had not yet truly been seen. In 1981 he took some time off to deal with the past two year’s occurrences and in 1982 he made a new series of prints and drawings, such as Bone, a lithograph which depicts a rather suspect mongrel wanting possession of the remaining bone from a prime rib.

This is a masterful print which combines the elements of his work prior to 1979 in line and humor and links them with a more primal direction developing in many artists’ work at this time. It has overtones to the intentionally primitive works which were beginning to appear in Soho in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. This print and others, like Under Way (1982) or Physical (1983), indicated that Himmelfarb had gone beyond the 1980 dark period and had made huge leaps toward a new vision of the world where social situations and moral allegories were instrumental to the subjects of the work. The sheer energy expressed upon the surface of the paper did not diminish in the translation to the etching plate or stone — prints and drawings were equally effused with this enthusiastic line. Formal qualities asserted their presence, but emotional issues had now assumed a secure footing in his image making.

In 1983 John Himmelfarb took his family to Dickerson, Maryland for a hiatus from the Chicago urban life, and here, in a rented farmhouse, he worked on new thoughts and realized new potentials. A self-portrait ink drawing from this year shows a confident and optimistic artist who looks fully upon himself for both inspiration and self-actualization. The work done upon his return to Oak Park in 1984 reveals a completely new direction. His new silkscreens, as in No Danger, No Delay (1984), are a bravura orchestration of color, pure and primary. Like in his earlier pieces, there is a sense of what could become chaos, but with the artist’s control a veritable symphony develops.

The most striking development in Himmelfarb’s latest work is the large-scale brush and ink drawings done on the 40×60″ Arches paper. These drawings are reactions to imagery seen in the Museum of Modern Art’s Primitivism exhibit as well as in the native clay masks which were evident in Irving Penn’s 1984 photographic retrospective at that same museum. These sources for imagery have provided remarkable inspiration and the immediacy and rawness of these large drawings engulf the viewer. The confrontation of the mask-like personages in November Meeting (1984) presents an interesting treatment of two themes. One, the primitive jungle environment suggested by foliage in the drawing is the setting for the chance meeting of two primordial beings. The other theme, and the one which also must be taken seriously, is the interaction of the artist who has discovered for himself the overwhelming power of these non-western artifacts. The actual confrontation is subliminal as well as physical. This is a positive meeting where a sophisticated artist well into a 15-year career is challenged by ideas and imagery that stimulated and inspired generations of artists before him. The meeting is more a gathering of old acquaintances, and we, the viewers, are the beneficiaries of this event.

This exhibition is one of 3 concurrent exhibits of John Himmelfarb’s work. There will be shows at the Area X Gallery in the East Village in NYC as well as at the Brody Gallery in Washington, D.C. The NYC show will showcase a ten-year overview of his paintings and ceramics (1975-1985) while the Brody  Gallery will show his recent paintings. This retrospective of prints and drawings completes the examination. John Himmelfarb’s work can be found in the collections of many national and regional museums, among them the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Collection of Fine Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Des Moines Art Center, the Sheldon Memorial Gallery of Art and the University of Iowa Museum of Art. Besides these institutional collections, his work can be found in many private collections nationally.

John Himmelfarb: Prints and Drawings, 1970-1985 is made possible through the generosity of Aalfs Manufacturing of Sioux City. Additional funds are provided by the Institute of Museum Services and the Sioux City Art Center Association.

Tom Butler, Assistant Director

Marilyn Laufer, Education Curator

You were born in Chicago after the war?

Yes, in 1946. Our family, though, immediately moved out to the country, They had just designed and built a house in the woods. I mention that because growing up in an isolated spot was very important to my artwork as a child and also as I grew up. A lot of the images I continue to use come from my early experience in the woods: the play forts, tree houses, the little bridges I built.

Were you alone most of the time?

I had an older sister, but I played a lot on my own in the woods. There were a couple of other children who lived a mile or so away, but a lot of the time was by myself. I anthropomorphized the animals in the woods, and to a great extent I was sure they were all conscious beings that spoke the language and had feelings.

Did you own a dog or a cat?

I had a donkey, a goat, and a dog — a Saint Bernard. And for a while, a German shepherd-collie mix. Animals keep popping up in my work, both the domestic ones and the wild ones.

How do you explain them to yourself?

Well, at that time I invested them with personalities and then, later, my exposure in college to various other cultures through anthropology sort of reversed it. You see animals as spirits of people, or at least as a metaphorical spirit of people.

Are the animals, say, in your brush and ink Jungle Tonight, hostile?

They are not hostile. All of my work, say 90% of it, has two aspects to it. One is anxiety, fear …

Do the animals represent your fears?

I think they represent my fears and the fears or everyone. Everybody has — whether they’re on the surface or deep down — fears that are awesome, fears about being alive.

And what’s the other side of that?

The other aspect is a sense of humor. I try to put these two things together. It may be awful but from a certain point or view, it’s also funny. I remember Harry Golden’s article about why he never bawls out a waitress when his soup is cold. He starts thinking about how big the universe is, how many stars there are, how many plants there are, and says, “What difference does it make if my soup is cold?” That’s the kind of humor — if you stand back far enough from the human predicament — where there’s a certain drama to it.

How long were you living in the country outside of Chicago?

I lived there until I went away to college, to Harvard, in 1964.

And you studied architecture?

Yes, but I was basically trying to get a liberal arts background. My major was architecture with a lot of design and studio courses. I also took literature, history and anthropology, trying to get as much of everything, rather than specialize.

In preparation for what exactly?

At the time I thought I was going into urban design or architecture or possibly urban government policy; then later, I thought, education.

Did you spend much time in the Fogg Museum? Did their collection interest you at all?

I got in there some, but it wasn’t too exciting to me. I didn’t have much background in art history. My art background comes from looking at European galleries a kid. My real excitement was with contemporary art. Most of my time was spent in the Le Corbusier Building at Carpenter Center doing these design and studio courses. I went over to the Fogg but it wasn’t a place where I took courses or dug around in their print and drawing collections,

What kind of exposure did your parents provide? Did they take you to galleries, show you books … ?

My parents took me wherever they went — to New York, to Chicago — to see art. My house was full of art. There were paintings and art books all over. They collected a certain amount, and breakfast, lunch, or dinner conversation often had to do with visual ideas … either about a painting in particular or about ways of describing what we were seeing out the window. They were always thinking in terms of what they saw as material for other work. They were both artists.

What kind of work did your father do?

He always had subject matter. He was abstract in a more technical sense of the word. It wasn’t non-objective … and his paintings were always about people in one environment or another — people looking out a window, people at a concert, people at a sporting event, musicians. He was actually a musician himself. As a sort of young starving artist in New York, he had played drums in vaudeville for Jimmy Durante and supported himself that way … he did portraits in Greenwich Village. But that wasn’t his real thing, just something he did to make money. So his work, at first glance, might strike you as abstract, but you stand in front of it a little while and it all becomes quite clear exactly what the imagery is about, what it is.

Did he work in oils or acrylics?

He worked in oils for many years. I’d say the last ten years he switched to acrylics.

You work almost exclusively in acrylics and ink (brush and ink).

I’ve used oils off and on. I started with oils and switched back and forth depending on which seems best suited for what trying to do — if I’m trying to get certain qualities of color that you can only get with one or the other. With oils, it stays wet longer, of course.

Getting back to your exposure to art, how interested were your parents in the “new” art and what did that mean to you in your home?

My parents were following the explosion of Abstract Expressionism and the new work coming out of Europe after the war. Picasso was highly accepted in my home and it wasn’t as if I had to overcome a cultural block. Dubuffet, Alechinsky, and Appel are artists I can remember being exposed to early … also people like Mark Tobey, Jackson Pollock, and …

Motherwell?

Yes. He and Franz Kline were artists who made an impression on me as a kid. Then, as I was about college age, the Pop artists had become international news. I was exposed to a lot of that in the ’60s.

What did you think of that work? It doesn’t seem to be anything like what you’re doing.

I didn’t really care for it as much [as Abstract Expressionism]. I mean I was excited because it was “new” but most of it didn’t speak for me in the same way that the Abstract Expressionists and the Europeans did. Although I do think I was very influenced by the Pop artists. My first paintings after college were quite flat and brightly colored.

You went to school during a pretty tumultuous time (the Vietnam War). Do you think that had any kind of effect on your work? Or the scene at Harvard with all the shifting around?

I think that my work reflected the lack of calm, yes. At that time my work was extremely complex — a lot of detail and everything jammed in — kind of a view of a world that’s at least in some ways very chaotic. Although there was an order to it; it was an order seen from a distance, not an order that was built out of logic seen at close range. In other words, my work took on a field quality.

Were you creating “automatically”?

Yes, pretty much. I worked spontaneously. I usually did not have a set idea when I’d start. I’d just put pen to paper and begin drawing. That automatic writing idea would come in, and then the ideas would flow out of that.

Could you describe the process?

Sometimes it would be images and sometimes not. Sometimes it would be texture and form. I would start with a pen on canvas and begin drawing. I felt committed to everything that went down as being final — not making a lot of changes and corrections. I would draw something on the canvas with the intensity intended for those lines to be the final demarcation of the painting. There wasn’t a preliminary sketch that I could keep erasing and scratching out.

So in terms of studies, you did your preliminary study right on the canvas.

Yes; I was just creating a skeleton and then worked the color right into it in a fairly precise way.

What kinds of colors were in these early works?

Primary colors, straight-out-of-the-tube colors. They were fit like jigsaw puzzles; everything was jammed up against each other. There was no sense of depth through perspective or through overlapping. Everything fit together on a frontal plane.

What were you trying to do with the first paintings you attempted?

I don’t think I had a fixed idea.

Did you say “I’m going to be a painter” and start painting?

In college I had a teacher in the design program who asked me what I was going to do. I was a sophomore and was just about done with all the studio courses there. I listed all the professions I was considering. He asked me, “Did you ever think about being an artist?” And I said, “No.” To myself I said, “Well you don’t decide to become an artist. Becoming an artist is something that happens to you. It’s out of your control. You hear voices from above and trumpets and somebody taps you on the shoulder and says: “You’re an artist’.”

You never heard those voices?

I hadn’t even seen the possibility. But the fact that he brought it up made it seem a possible choice, like “Why not?” One could choose to do something like that.

How did that change you?

I wrote a proposal for the department in design language on the suggestion of this same teacher and was, in my junior year (1967), able to draw several hours a day and get credit for it. I had already taken most of the studio courses, so I was doing my work and not taking time away from my studies. And I was being taken seriously by someone other than my family. I was being critiqued on an adult level. I found I was extremely happy spending my time that way. It clicked. That was the bell as far as I was concerned. I never even thought that choosing to be an artist at that time was a moral choice, because being an artist in an age where social needs were so great was self-indulgent. Yet I found that was the thing that clicked for me, that made me really content in an inner way. There was no point in trying to be a do-gooder for other social needs if I’m going to be unhappy at the same time. I wouldn’t do a good job at any of those things if that was not what satisfied me. So the decision happened in about a two week period. My other teachers told me, “You can’t do that. You can’t make a living doing that.” But I’m still doing it …

So there were no emotional barriers for you.

No. Certainly my parents had nothing against it. They didn’t tell me I’d starve; they didn’t fight it. They didn’t say it was going to be easy either, but they thought it was a fine thing to do with my time if that’s what I wanted to do.

But after you graduated Harvard you stayed and got a masters in education.

Yes, but in that process I was exposed to the classroom, practiced teaching, and realized it was not for me. I wanted to finish the degree (I was getting some credit for painting in graduate school). I was also getting paid and living out in the country again, in a small cabin on the edge or the Bogostow Pond, about 30 miles outside Boston. I got the cabin free in exchange for taking care of the sheep on the property, so that’s one of my past jobs: shepherd.

Did you live out there alone?

Yes, but I’d commute in frequently to do my coursework.

Were you a loner in those days?

I wasn’t totally asocial. I had some friends.

Were they artists?

No. Harvard was not a place brimming with artists. They didn’t have an art department, so painting was a fairly solitary activity in terms of getting feedback.

And you were content to spend that time alone?

I’d had the experience growing up in the country of being more or less on my own, deciding what to do on my own. I had learned a lot of self-discipline as a child, studying violin and piano. I had to discipline myself to get in the number of hours every day necessary to practice … I took it pretty seriously.

How long was it, after you decided that you were going to paint full-time, that you had your first show?

Not too long. The first show I had was in this little town where I had the cabin. Millis, Massachusetts has a very nice modern public library. The people from whom I got the cabin were on the board of the library. They were just starting an art exhibition program and invited me to show my drawings. That was my first opening, my first exhibition. The library even bought a painting, which still hangs in the entrance area. That was my first “big” sale.

Did that change anything for you?

There was a feeling of excitement. I got some press coverage in the local paper, a photograph. I knew it was small time but it was a nice start. It helped me get going. I can’t remember what came next, but various small things came along, and then I moved back to Chicago. I started doing prints and going around to talk to galleries, and getting some galleries to take my work on consignment. I moved around from one gallery to another quite a bit before I knew where I was going.

Now after fifteen years of painting and drawing and printmaking, you’ve sold to some pretty impressive collections and museums. Where do you see yourself in five years?

In five years it’ll be 1990. I’ll be 44. I’ll be in a few more museum collections, have had a few more shows in New York, a little more press coverage in the magazines. I’ll be selling about twice as much as I’m selling now if things continue to improve at the same rate as they have. I expect, I hope my work will be considerably better. I’m not trying to program myself to be on the cover of Life magazine or in the centerfold of Vogue — it’s just not my style.

Your development has been long-range, then. The recent show at Area X is only your fourth in New York and your third one-man show [Terry Dintenfass Gallery: 1979, 1983].

I have in a way tried to prove to myself that it was possible to survive and build a decent career as an American artist without worrying about New York very much, so I’ve put a lot of energy into showing in other parts of the country and less energy into developing an audience in New York. I did prove to my own satisfaction that it was possible. Now I feel I don’t have to prove that anymore and I am spending more time in New York and enjoying it.

New York is the center; its gravity must have effected you. How did you survive as a full-time artist without plying your art in New York?

I assumed, at the very beginning, that New York was a major feat, a major roadblock to becoming the kind or artist I wanted to be, surviving long enough to do what I wanted to do. So in the very beginning I took a year off from my painting and bought a very cheap building in a slum in Chicago. I tore it apart, put it together, and made it habitable so in a very rough way I’d have a studio and a place to live that would be all mine. It was cheap enough that I could just buy it outright. That really gave me my base from which to start. I’ve always tried to keep control of my life and not get too dependent on one source so that I could make it for the long haul. I’ve always had a very long-term strategy about how to survive.

John Himmelfarb looks at things from a point outside chronological time where he can play evolutionary games with images of plants, animals, and man-made forms. He delineates his visualizations in a number of seemingly contradictory ways, trusting his intuitive sense to guide him.

In this series of recent drawings Himmelfarb worked alternately within three compositional modes. They developed from dense, open-ended “topographies” (the major body of this group), to more formalized grid frameworks, and finally to the row structures, which evolved from the idea of separating the grids into their components. Each mode, he feels, was a release from the others. “From work to work, a particularly controlled or restrained piece evoked a response in the form of a wilder one. So after a grid [or a row drawing] I would often go back to an open format without the predetermined understructure.”

The lines that circumscribe half-familiar, transient shapes in Himmelfarb’s grid drawings are relatively uniform, favoring no particular area. The topographies contain irregular linear networks, laboriously constructed with an assortment of minuscule penstrokes. Although the topographies are dense, the lines rarely hid the paper’s surface. In fact, much of the perceptual excitement that can be enjoyed while looking at Himmelfarb’s drawings comes from studying the charged, ambivalent spaces within and between forms.

The earlier grids in this series were derived from Himmelfarb’s method of plotting the spread of a topography. He realized that he had always intuitively divided the page into a grid by blocking out with his hand areas of light and dark, direction and flow. His exercises with the grid framework defined this automatic procedure, and the row drawings represented an even more stylized investigation of structure. Within the boundaries of the rows, however, Himmelfarb was free to cover the surfaces with bands or columns of forms in a rapid process similar to writing.

The open forms that circulate in his row drawings move in different ways. Some resemble pictographic Stonehenge alphabets whose characters tumble across the page in a primitive anapestic rhythm. In others, fluid columns of dots and short curving strokes recall the elegant characters of Chinese calligraphy which had fascinated Himmelfarb since his youth. “Sometimes,” remarked the artist, “there are immediate subliminal influences. Images of a house, an animal with legs, a building or a car will pass through my mind and they come out in the drawings as an elaboration on a basic block form to which appendages are added to make it go in one direction or another.”

The strength of John Himmelfarb’s drawings lies in his use of line — a use that goes back to the dawn of civilization when cavemen thought to capture the life force of animals by delineating their moving silhouettes on rock walls. The line that the cave artist used was a magical line; when it came close enough to the characteristic rhythms of the animal, the cave people thought it acquired the animal’s powers. Hence the marvelous sensibility of the cave drawings to nuances of shape, gesture, and movement.

John Himmelfarb also believes in the potency of line — in its ability to confer on drawn images more power than their existence as two dimensional marks on a flat surface would seem to warrant. Like the cave artist he has studied his subjects for every nuance of gesture, body movements and attitudes. But instead of choosing the isolated living being for his subject, he has chosen to portray modern man in his environment, in all its chaotic complexity.

These drawings exist on three levels of perception. At first one notices the line itself, moving, twisting, turning back on itself in myriad configurations. It’s a bit like looking down at a box of swarming larvae. One has an impression of teeming life, but no individual image stands out. At this stage Himmelfarb’s work is reminiscent of Surrealists such as Masson and even post-Surrealists like Pollock who used techniques of automatic drawing. The hand moves over the page restlessly, unconsciously and its energy is transferred to the line, creating charged linear fields. Some of the landscape drawings in this book remain at this stage of particularity. They depict no identifiable place or objects but vividly recall the experience of landscape. Nature to Himmelfarb is synonymous with rhythms of life, not with discreet structures.

The drawings of the urban scene also contain these driving rhythms. But in these works, Himmelfarb faces up to the Surrealist’s dilemma: how to create readable images through automatic techniques. As one looks at the drawings, gradually patterns emerge. Figures briefly separate themselves from the environment only to be reabsorbed as the eye moves on. Directions of movement carry the eye from one figure to another. Order appears in the chaos, but cannot be tied down.

What I really like is putting ink on paper, putting paint on anything, making marks, moving, changing things, reusing my daily experience to create a sense of order about my chaotic world. I enjoy the chaos of life, even the nonsense of our experience, but it gives me comfort to make something of it all while doing something I enjoy. Of course the struggle to organize everything into a compelling visual statement isn’t any easier for me than for anyone else, and I admit to some anxiety when that sense of order eludes me too long on a particular canvas, but it creates less anxiety than staying away from the canvas altogether. Children sort out the world through play activities, and what I do is not dissimilar. Of course I hope that my efforts to draw something organized out of my interactions with literature, music and industry; trees and language; numbers and maps; and everything and everybody else that bumps into me during the night and day will resonate with a few other people because they recognize their own bumping into and being bumped into. I am not too concerned about whether my work contains images or not. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. But I admit that the shape, line and form (if they are any good) are always drawn from something, even when I can’t really tell myself what. And the color is always the color of the paint itself. Though it intends to have a subjective effect on people, it is not representational. So much for process. To describe what my pictures look like, I’d like to quote from John Brunetti because he writes so much better than I do: