The cultural history of Los Angeles has proved more elusive than the histories of other American cities. This is a town, after all, where one's splash sends its ripples out into a vast sprawl. In other places those ripples can be pointedly ignored or lost in a welter of other ripples; in L.A., they simply radiate into the void, as if the very atmosphere were indifferent. This ether has been filled somewhat in recent years by a veritable army of artists and, finally, a support system that has attracted them and the city hard-won international recognition. But back when Saul White was a young Turk ? or young Beat ? and had just moved here from New York, no less, L.A. artists were still voices clamoring in a desert. They relied on one another, and almost no one else, for support and response, and when they made any waves at all, they got put in the county jail sooner than they got put in ARTnews.
Wallace Berman, Ed Kienholz, and the other troublemakers at the Ferus Gallery have already been inscribed into a local art history, and that's only fair. Their innovations, after all, came at a social and personal price. Travelling in a different (if intersecting) circle, Saul White did not engage in the same kind of artistic provocation; if he got busted, it was for extra-artistic behavior. Earlier in the decade, the kind of abstraction he was practicing in New York had raised hackles in L.A., for the most dumbly politicized of reasons. But after the McCarthy era it was hard to believe that "Red propaganda" was embedded in red shapes, and abstract art had become something done by those the populace viewed as artistic, maybe social, but not political subversives.
White's art of the late 1950s carried on the recently established Abstract Expressionist "tradition" (part of what critic Harold Rosenberg dubbed the "tradition of the new"). Rather than search for whole new approaches, the young painter alit upon a given approach that by sheer dint of his vision he made his own. Ever since, several decades and several thousand miles removed from the source, he has continued to work in an Abstract Expressionist mode. He has watched the style become pass? even shunted aside, and finally he has greeted it as it has come back around to a younger, hipper audience. But while Abstract Expressionism "went away" for the most of the rest of the art world in the `60s, for White it simply went underground, where he tended to situate himself anyway.
It's almost awkward for White to re-emerge from his embracing, defiant obscurity. But he has returned to our attention, and he remains very much an Abstract Expressionist. White's reappearance, and his almost insolent practice of a manner now relegated to the history books, allow us to see not simply how good he is at the manner, but how complex the manner really is. White still paints with all the brio found in the gestural work of painters working on both coasts in the 1950s. His standing as a Second Generation "Ab Ex" figure is reconfirmed, even elevated somewhat, by his recent work. If he were a 30-year-old rediscovering and recapitulating action painting (and there are a few, doing so rather well) then, of course, White would be a Third, even Fourth Generation Ab Exer. But he's got not just the chops but the track record to fix him earlier in the history, in and among the bold inheritors of De Kooning, Kline, and Krasner.
In fact, the Lee Krasner retrospective, happily on view at the same time as White's own show (his first in years), provides significant points of stylistic comparison. At crucial points in her career Krasner ? like compeers of her own such as Robert Motherwell and even her husband Jackson Pollock ? employed the collage technique on and in her paintings and drawings. Indeed, the use of collage, especially of "recycled" shards of her own (and in a few cases Pollock's) discarded paintings and drawings, characterizes several of Krasner's most forceful bodies of work.
White (who remembers seeing some of Krasner's collage-paintings in her studio) employs a similar technique in many of his canvases, affixing pieces of other paintings at crucial points inside new ones, thus introducing an extra dimension of formal dynamism. This dimension manifests in the presence of brushstrokes moving in countervalence to the predominant strokes, in the appearance of another kind of edge than that of the stroke itself, in the condition of the canvas as an assembled rather than as a seamless surface, and in other factors unusual to the normally through-composed, even all-over compositions most characteristic of Abstract Expressionism. Such an approach would seem to substantiate Clement Greenberg's reading of Abstract Expressionism as progressing directly out of Cubism. If anything, however, this collaged method keeps Abstract Expressionism at least partly in Cubism, maintaining the broken surface and discontinuous visual field of the early 20th century style.
Even where he does not employ actual collage, White paints with the "collage aesthetic" in mind. This aesthetic (originally identified by post-Abstract Expressionist painter Budd Hopkins) describes the discontinuous, assembled composition (or, if you would, imagery) as the predominant artistic (and by extension visual) mode of the 20th century. Interruption and non sequitur are in fact not the exclusive domain of Postmodernism; the dynamic juxtaposition of disparate elements has figured in most abstract art of this last century, and much of its figurative art as well. Even the figure-ground tension which Hans Hofmann taught so many nascent Abstract Expressionists (Krasner not least) can be read as a kind of collage, placing contrasting images or structures against one another for maximum compositional, not to mention coloristic, effect. We see White doing precisely this even in his non-collage canvases, controlling a back-and-forth between shapes and colors no matter how large or ultimately continuous the field.
This brings us to points of comparison with White's own non-painterly Los Angeles compeers, the generation of Beats and post-Beats who pioneered an expansive engagement of the assemblage process. Such an engagement followed on the heels of Abstract Expressionism in New York as well, and was emerging even before White left for the West; but in Los Angeles (and San Francisco) it paralleled painterly Ab Ex, was considered the sculptural equivalent ? just as jazz was considered the musical coeval ? and maintained a lively dialogue with painting. Sustaining his collage aesthetic, White has maintained a concomitant relationship with the assemblage practice of others. The high spirits, spontaneity, and formal rigor underlying these seemingly undisciplined characteristics are evident in White's paintings no less than they do in the assemblage-sculptures of George Herms or MArk Di Suvero.
Energy and improvisational impulse, framed by a subtle but powerful organizational skill ? a "rage for chaos" (in Morse Peckham's words) counterbalanced by a gift for order ? describes the kind of jazz that the Abstract Expressionists and the assemblage artists listened to, identified with, and often played. It should come as no surprise, then, to find that Saul White is a longtime jazz player as well as painter, nor that his playing is painterly just as his painting swings. The be-bop spirit of White's art is rooted in the explosive rebelliousness of the postwar era, specifically in the moment at which that rebelliousness began to turn outward but had not yet lost its interiority. White has kept that part-inside-part-outside force alive for some forty years or more, and it's now burst again to the surface.
Peter Frank
Los Angeles,
November 1999
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