January 19, 2008
the first time I met Michael Goldberg in 1979 in Paris during its a morning in late July. He brought with him, including cards and small paintings, some thirty works including some we had to choose to use his show to me. I had already pre-selected through a slide that had sent me a couple of months ago and we agreed to meet the parties to the Bastille in the study lent for the occasion by his friend the sculptor.
Almost all works belong to the Codex series that began in those years and for which there are still many large paintings, which I facilitated organizing the exhibition. After the initial pleasantries, he scattered the works on the floor in random order and so we began to select works to be exhibited, apparently by mutual agreement, but felt like he did not make a big difference to choose one or another, were basically all " its work. " Even if it did not react in any way trying to give an explanation (a "read-educated" in key aesthetic and cultural-philosophical) works that I chose, merely nodded, seemed waiting to discover what the real feeling that I had with her work. In fact was excited and finally began to talk on a land more friendly when I revealed that I chose this job because I really liked the way "that yellow stripe ended up there to get stuck in the middle between the large patch of blue and red thick brush beside him." Eventually the ice had melted and Mike decided to open the bottle of Chablis that was waiting nearby in the bucket. And we toasted to the success of the show and the beginning of our friendship.
That of the Codex was a series that, even in the slides, I liked a lot because on the surface of each work is structured, approaching or in opposition to each other freely, abstract forms and fields of various types and color held together, linked by the presence and interacted bars or color bands and thin strips and slips color which mark the boundaries between different forms and movements, worked at the same time as a scaffold or carrier at all. A set of precarious balance and continue to get a picture of contrasts precise and solid unit. Or even all that could be completely overturned. These jobs were now completely different, but for some details, still recalled to mind the series of paintings that he painted between 1960 and 1963 and defined by Klaus Kertess, "Architecting Paint." This was the first but fundamental "fascination" that incorporated the painting of the day Mike and I constantly found in all his later works or series of works that followed in future years.
fact, even today, what fascinates me is his painting that set of forms and colors seem messed up but self-forming unit, and also intrigues me that strange feeling of being able to overturn labyrinthine and change all the time the reading corner.
In my view the painting in his paintings never tries to cause effects on the retina of the observer or, above all, rational brain reactions on the content of a work of art that, as he says (paraphrasing Adorno in his own way) 'It will never be the sum of the intellect that is pumped in to determine the content of a framework ", (1), but slips nonchalantly in the deep layers of our emotion, forcing us to face-to-compare the different sensations of order or chaos, balance or imbalance that we receive from the panel urging our personal and work life listening attitude and willingness to be more intimate or less involved with it.
that day, to my surprise, he insisted it needed to take a lot to be included in the exhibition, even two or three jobs a few years back and very different from the contemporary world and which sprang from the set of Codex. Previous work seemed more "experimental" means the surface of raw paper, hardly painted, was tortured, raped by strappetto, abrasions and holes caused as burns from cigarette butts, all mixed with a light colored, diluted, and transparent watercolor, as "slaves".
just could not grasp its continuity, back down in the Codex. It was only a few months later, in the works mounted on the wall of the exhibition that I realized why Mike had wanted to include those older workers: all the actions he carried out on the paper were concentrated in a shape that vaguely resembled a bow, once architectural form of imperfect semicircle, or (as instinctively imagined, as Tuscan) from the familiar, vague form hills.
And this is another aspect that concerns continued his painting at that when I did not consider enough, but that has surfaced and I found it confirmed even more recently, after I saw the paintings created during a business trip in his house in the hills of Siena in the years between 1982 and 1990.
I had seen reproductions of his works in a catalog of 1959 (2) on American painting and to be a painter from the early action painting that operated in the magic of the New York art scene of the '50s, which belongs to the generation of a few years younger of the "heroic" of Pollock, Gorky, de Kooning, Rothko and F. Kline, and then from the country in which you praised, both in painting and art, the sublime and minimalism, I was not expecting that so as to produce a completely different painting styles from New York where we used to see here, in Europe in the mid 70s. View in landscape painting that was then at that time Michael Goldberg seemed transformed, transfigured. Meanwhile it had become very "outdated" (the mere fact of "painting" was considered outdated in those years - although many continued to do so in the silence of their studies), certainly "unusual", not because of the contrast between feelings of balance and disequilibrium, or for that ghostly landscape, which I kept (and continues) to "feel", but because most popular closely observed and carefully, you could see in this painting that something had happened during his becoming, it felt like painting a typically times of crisis: stripped, dense, doughy and full of tension at the same time. It deliberately "insolent." Painting that made a palpable uneasiness, as if this was still a painful memory, the set was thus created an atmosphere in which music would be called blues, and it was precisely this aspect that struck me oddly in his painting and his paintings. Perhaps because it was all just the opposite of nice, abstract, striking painting of American Color Fields, then highly fashionable and prevailing because naively believed to be the natural heir, the continuation of Abstract Expressionism. And nothing to do with even the ascetic, dry, mental minimal painting of Fundamental Painting (3) as Ryman and Frank Stella. (Even Stella, after leaving the minimal and geometric paintings with which he had become famous, would come only at the end of the seventies to research other similar relief in his paintings painted metal).
Perhaps the unease that despite all transpired from strokes was based on his memories, the memory of the facts of personal history or probably on nostalgia for an era now past and how it was nice to be able to live in those early Fifty through the adventure of painting. In that magical moment and exciting that sort of "Eldorado" to someone who had aligned with the rules, had yielded fame and commercial success while others, in a few years, things had changed and found themselves expelled from Eden. (Sample is in this sense, the succession of ups and downs, both critics of the market, the painting by Philip Guston). But the uncomfortable
probably also come from determination to continue painting "in his own way" and in spite of everything that was going around, trying to express with stubbornness and obstinacy only one painting all "his". In
paintings by painters at that time remained in the shadows, most clearly in those of the Americans than in Europeans, we could still distinguish, under the skin of the painting, all the scars of the "beatings" suffered during the sensational claims of international Pop Art, Minimal, Arte Povera and Conceptual Art, a set of trends that alternated between 60 and 70 on stage, but that did not have much to do with the ideas with which these artists carry out their work.
Planning unilateral interpretations put in place during the '70s by opinionmakers era: critics, magazines and exhibitions in museums, they had to have caused the paintings of Michael Goldberg, as in that of some of his own generation (as in what I saw so many other painters of "non-aligned") quite a few "mutilations" and forcing them to toil all transformations, relegating them to a state of constant discomfort. Undoubtedly come with your "paint" the results of full maturity and blooms today, forced the steps were necessary for him as for others, and some obstacles along the path of a life together and still must be addressed and removed. Indeed, it seems, that it is precisely such a process, to be considered necessary, to achieve its full maturity "to do".
But this is always so essential? Sooner or then in the art, including the history and the market, they are recognized delays and errors of assessment in the past, at which time must be given to Mike what is owed. If nothing else, all due respect and consideration for the value, consistency, strength and depth with which he pursued his artistic career. Finally, in recent decades and especially in his painting recently everything seems much more relaxed, laid back, a paint almost "joyful", which musically describes itself as "lyrical."
The series of pictures follow one after the other with renewed strength coloristic and expressive in some even recovered the original interest in the abstract landscape as metaphor. Asked the first time in 1980/81 by Carmengloria Morales at his home in Sermugnano to spend a summer, along with his wife Lynn Umlauf, holiday and painting, he is fond of Italy and then to Tuscany where, since 1987, stays for long periods of the year in the rustic country that has rented in the Siena hills, alternating with NYC, where he continues to teach and paint. In his new studio, working on small and large pictures is painting in which his old love for the urban landscape abstract combines and compares with the influences of Italian Renaissance painting of the Masters and Mannerism in Florence and Siena. As he himself confesses in his written in September 1997 in Issue 22 of the Cahiers d'Art magazine: "Being the type of person that really does not appreciate nature - I'm almost allergic to - surprise me still my decision to spend five months a year buried in the Tuscan countryside. Surely I'm here for the sense of alienation, the lack of interruptions, the need to spend long periods of time with his nose deep thoughts to devote to art and life. What luxury! The classical painting is for me lifeblood. The intense faith and the virtuosity of Titian, the insane brightness of Grunewald, the honest and simple pleasures of Rubens, the eye and skilful hand of Giotto and Simone Martini, the light piercing of Piero Della Francesca is a drug of my choice and make on-site experience is infinitely exciting. "
In these long years, our friendship has consolidated more and more and I continue to exhibit every two to three years, its new series of paintings depicting here in Tuscany. The show we did recently was his tenth in Livorno in my personal gallery.
Today, throughout this story, the thing that tickles my vanity is the idea (fantasy?) Of stealing a neglected tree that threatened to finish the frenetic metropolitan traffic choked Manhattan and helping him to replant the olive trees and the vineyards of Chianti, where I observed its rebirth, I've seen it thrive fruit and blossom with colors more beautiful. Of course none of this has been the realization of the utopian dream of my life, nor the statement of my personal success but more shocking, given the sad times that surround us, I find that after all is just another one of the simplest recipes for useful survive and continue to enjoy the life that little bit of good that we can still weave. The same thought occurs to me in the morning for a cappuccino at the bar: with a sprinkle of powdered cocoa takes on a different flavor, no, I find that it tastes more ordinary. So he continued to paint as they please, and I continue today to look at Mike's profile and enjoy the beautiful colors of her paintings, hung on the walls of my tunnel. And sometimes we take a glass of Chablis set.
Roberto Peccolo, November 2003
(This paper is the new edition, revised, enlarged and corrected, one of my text which appeared in issue 22 of the magazine Cahiers d'Art of the Sept.-Oct. 1997. The magazine was dedicated at that a large number service to Michael Goldberg)
(1) From a conference MG 1991. Reprinted in MG, Soul / Soul Series "Painting and Memory", Morgana Edizioni, Florence 2002.
(2) Catalog "Art Nova" Torino, 1959. Exhibition organized by M. Tapié and L. Pistoi the movement of artists in Turin (Informal European survey of artists, painters americani dell'Action painting americani e artisti giapponesi del Gruppo Gutai). (3) Titolo della mostra “Fundamental Painting” tenutasi allo Stedelijk Museuro di Amsterdam nel 1975 a cura di R. Dippel.
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