The English-born painter John Walker, whose work is
currently the subject of a compelling exhibition at Knoedler & Company, now
teaches at Boston University and has lately been painting in Maine. He is,
among much else, an Expressionist with an appetite for big, elegiac subjects.
He is also an Abstractionist with a yearning for the resources of
representation. He has clearly forsaken pure abstraction as inadequate to his
pictorial purposes; yet even as it embraces certain elements of representation,
his painting nonetheless remains steadfast in its loyalty to the aesthetics of
abstraction.
This is a more common conundrum among modernist painters of
Mr. Walker’s generation (he was born in 1939) than you might suppose, and one
of the reasons that Mr. Walker commands attention at the moment is his refusal
to disguise the divided character of his artistic ambitions. Another reason is,
of course, the authority he brings to the painterly medium.
However one chooses to characterize this ambition, Mr. Walker’s
is clearly a talent haunted by history: both the distant and recent history of
painting itself, and his family history-especially his father’s horrific
experience in the trenches during the First World War. All of this places a
very heavy burden on Mr. Walker’s painting, and the wonder is not that he
doesn’t always succeed in bringing these disparate impulses into perfect
harmony with each other, but that he manages to make so much of their
inevitable collision.
Coherence is not to be expected from this collision of
interests and loyalties, and there is no use in pretending that the current
exhibition at Knoedler’s, which is called John
Walker: Time and Tides , doesn’t give us a kind of split-screen account of
the artist’s governing aspirations. Subjects drawn from nature-in this case,
the landscape of the Maine coast-tend to be treated with a turbulence almost as
dour as those that evoke the violence of war, while the subject of war is
treated more allusively by recourse to the words of poets who have written
about it.
In the most ambitious of Mr. Walker’s war elegies, large
areas of the canvas are covered with words from the most famous English poets
of the First World War-Wilfred Owen and David Jones-and from a more recent
poem, Rosanna Warren’s Mud (for John
Walker) (1997), written in direct response to Mr. Walker’s paintings. All
of these poetic words are inscribed in neat rows on the picture surface by the
painter, using a loaded brush, against (in some cases) a background grid of
what looks to be a chain-link fence. The words in this painterly script aren’t
always easily legible, but that is less important than the fact that they are
in any case less horrific than the macabre figures of a man with a sheep’s
skull for a head-Mr. Walker’s symbolic representation of his father as a
casualty of the carnage of war.
What is one to make of this problematic practice of using
words-or rather, writing, and lots of it-as a substitute or embellishment of
pictorial form? Opinions will naturally differ on this question, but I have to
confess to an aversion to paintings that press a great many words into serving
as pictorial images. This practice strikes me as a conflation or confusion of
genres that invites us to participate in emotions for which the painter has clearly
failed to find a specific pictorial correlative. Poems that read well, that
really engage our minds and emotions on the printed page, become something else
when turned into brush marks on an oversize canvas. Writ large on the painted
surface, they hector, they sermonize, they substitute a literary message for a
medium that is fundamentally-and gloriously!-wordless. They are a confirmation
that there are certain catastrophes in modern experience for which modernist
painting has not yet found an adequate means of expression.
The Maine landscapes in Mr. Walker’s current exhibition are
something else entirely. They are certainly the best paintings by Mr. Walker I
have seen. They also bear no resemblance to any other paintings of the Maine
sea coast, a subject that has certainly inspired a good many masterworks in the
past, especially in the art of John Marin and Marsden Hartley, but also a good
deal of pictorial kitsch. Mr. Walker approaches this overused subject as an
outsider, and with a determination to avoid the picturesque. This is Maine in
what is called the mud season, when the earth and the sea drain the fugitive
light of its clarity and sparkle, and nature itself can seem to be unforgiving
and unrenewable.
In my view, anyway, the paradox of this Time and Tides exhibition is that Mr. Walker is far more successful
in striking a tragic note in these landscape paintings than in the war elegies
that are so deliberately designed to elicit a sense of human tragedy. In his
essay for the catalog of the exhibition, Jack Flam speaks of Mr. Walker’s
“images of war,” but what really dominates the war paintings are images of
words about war, and this has the effect of placing the subject of war itself
at a certain distance from our experience of painting. It is in his “images of
nature” that Mr. Walker succeeds in reminding us of what painting can achieve
in expressing the gravest emotions. Does this suggest that the artist has now
irrevocably abandoned the ambiguities of abstraction for the kind of
representation that has haunted his painting for some years now? Probably not.
A refusal to choose between abstraction and representation seems to be the
keynote of his work just now. But it will be interesting to see where his
attachment to the Maine sea coast takes him in the future. Meanwhile, these
landscapes of Maine instantly take their place in the great tradition of
northern romantic landscape painting.
John Walker: Time and
Tides remains on view at Knoedler & Company, 19 East 70th Street,
through March 3.
