Chapter 8: The Final Years

In an intriguing article of 1960, which once again paid homage to his friend and mentor, Carl Holty attempted to assess Piet Mondrian’s relationship to current painting. He was quick to point out that Mondrian was never the dominant figure that Picasso and Matisse were in this era. “It was his fate to stand alone,” Holty said, “a sort of ‘homme de resistance’ of an art born out of Cubism.” While Mondrian’s influence on contemporary painting was indirect, he continued, “ I believe it was nevertheless profound [especially] in what might be called the enemy or alien camp, i.e., in the school of Abstract Expressionism.”

While structural accents, or rhythms, had often been mentioned as coming from Mondrian, other influences on expressionist works were less obvious. Holty was the first spokesman to attribute to that artist what critics later considered to be one of his most important legacies. As the younger man wrote:

The artists of this movement are indebted to Mondrian for much of their pictorial freedom, whether they are aware of it or not. The “all-over” painting vogue with its aim of absorbing all particular elements into one unified surface, can be traced to no other artist.

It was Mondrian who demonstrated in his own work that we could arrive at a plastic result without digging or carving into the surface of the picture. He proved that­ color, volume, space and form were the results of contrast in size and direction on a two-dimensional surface.

In addition to Mondrian’s “preservation of the surface,” Holty had long been interested in his rejection of the pictorial image that the Cubists Picasso, Braque, and Gris, “would not relinquish,” he said. The younger artist began to realize that this image meant little or nothing to him as he attempted to separate himself from geometric stylization by making his forms looser and less arbitrary. He broke these forms into patches that no longer suggested their geometric origins although they still hid figural or horse and rider schemes, as in three paintings of the mid­fifties (figs. 1–3).

All along, Holty had faced sweeping mood swings about his work. When he first realized, in the early 1950s, that the court case on his grandfather’s will would be decided against him, leaving him an uncertain future, the artist wrote with some desperation to good friends, Howard Thomas and his wife, about what he could do “to keep from disintegrating or committing a crime.” In the same letter, though, he spoke of being able to paint, even if under great difficulties:

Today I do not need, indeed, cannot use more than a few hours daily for painting itself. My work is moving more and more into the direction of the sensory and the inspired and even the crisis I find myself in now has sharpened my understanding of what (at least for me) counts today. What I am saying and saying badly is that actual painting is easy for me now and that the planning and plotting necessary goes on in my head without interfering with whatever else I am obliged to do—even while lecturing ideas about colors and shapes come to my mind. Then when I actually go to work form and color are there or they are not there. In the latter case one can begin again or use the garbled fragments as a stimulus for a new try.

By “lecturing,” in the previous passage, Holty was referring to the teaching that he did to make a living after having to accept only a small settlement from his grandfather’s estate, an amount far short of what he had been led to expect would support him and his family for the rest of their lives. He taught off and on at the New York’s Art Students League beginning in 1939, and at Hunter College later on in the 1960s; these stints were “part-time,” a status that did not give him an adequate living. In 1948, he had taken the position of Artist-in-Residence at the University of Georgia, where he remained for two years. Holty told in the following passage how this position had come to him:

Howard Thomas and I met sometime in the mid-twenties at a sketch club on Mason Street in Milwaukee. He, at that time, was a high school art teacher who attracted the favorable attention of an old teacher of mine, Gustave Moeller, Head of the Art Department at the State Teachers College, now the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Howard became a teacher there and succeeded Gustave Moeller upon the latter’s death three or four years later. Howard was one of those able administrators who hated the task and at sometime in the late 1930’s he left Milwaukee and went south and I lost track of him until the 1940’s when a painting of his was reproduced in one of the art magazines. In – 1948 I received a letter from Howard, then teaching at the University of Georgia, in which he sounded me out about an Artist in Residence there in the coming year. What with the Samuel Kootz Gallery staggering toward failure, this proposition appeared attractive to me indeed and I wrote of my willingness to accept such a position. Shortly thereafter I received a visit from Mr. Lamar Dodd, Head of the Art Department at Georgia. He seemed to be satisfied with me and with examples of the work I had been doing, and so in the autumn of that year I began what was to be a career as a much wandering college art teacher, a career that terminated (the wandering part) when I was called to Brooklyn College as a full professor in 1964 and where, after retirement in 1970, I still teach as a resident lecturer. (VI, 2080-2081)

While in Georgia, Holty began to paint in a style that would lead to a continuing commitment to abstraction. He told how that happened in this passage:

I had adopted the method of painting in patches of color shortly before I came to Georgia. I had overpainted certain canvases with white, but not as a house painter might do. I applied large patches of white and watched the colors that remained of the picture underneath as little by little they were engulfed by the white cover [figs. 4–8]. I noticed that these left-over spots assumed a significance they did not have in the original picture I was covering. Some glowed brilliantly, others became bits of nothing much at all, rather colorless fragments of paint. But these bits of paint gave me the idea of building from them, perhaps in the manner of Signac, and I came upon a method by which the forms and shapes developed apace and were always under control and I proceeded to work at a few still life motifs this way. The Georgia years were unusually productive because the casual and fairly non-committal way of working permitted change without the pains of a total rebuilding, and I blanketed the countryside with those paintings. I was fairly generous at that time about giving pictures away and Howard Thomas had one of the best. I frequently sold a picture for $20.00, the price of a newly prepared piece of masonite and a stretcher frame to hold it as fresh material was worth more to me than a finished picture. One or two were donated to the Art Department of the University itself, so there were enough pictures of that period around for almost everyone to know of them and what they looked like. (VI, 2083-2084)

The artist found that his work was influential on others, especially on Thomas:

From his Art Institute days onward, [Thomas’s] work had been competent but rather flat and undistinguished until he discovered the power and beauty of the small color spot that in our time stems from the pointillism of the post-impressionists but actually derives from the great periods of mosaic painting. Through pursuing this manner of work, he gradually overcame the faulty three­dimensional structuring of his early work in this direction, a contradiction of the idiom that made his cityscapes appear to be made of postage stamps. Once he overcame that hurdle, his harmonies, nourished on movement and countermovement alone, proliferated in variety and intensity and he was in full control of his style. Thus he attained a musicality and lyricism which though not dramatic (the very means of his choice of technique made that impossible) was beautiful, firm, and unequivocal. (VI, 2082-2083)

The inspiration to free himself entirely from the “conceptual approach” came to Holty during one of the intermittent New York periods in the 1950s when he happened to see “certain stained walls of the subway, the result of fires set to dry the walls.” “It was the first time,” he wrote, “that I saw non-representational. images that had the strength and character of representational images.” Translating such shapes into painting brought the artist into what he recognized as a “new formal world,” one requiring an “imagination invested in things seen, i.e., seeing new combinations in shapes or colors that are not actually there at all” (II, 9).

Holty wrote about the process as it occurred in another context, when he once found himself forced to wait for a legal appointment and rather than read the usual office magazines stared at a linoleum rug that was printed with marbelized blocks of a dull orange, white, and light gray, set into a charcoal gray or black ground:

While I was staring aimlessly enough at that floor I suddenly realized that one of the blocks I was looking at was a perfectly beautiful abstract composition, the forms tugging at each other so that some of them seemed to rise in movement, others to fall. As the color was more or less monochrome, it could be discounted and one could imagine other colors, deep and light, that would enhance the vague or sharply defined shapes as they were held in superb equilibrium. This was a find indeed and no sooner had I discovered this composition when I spied another and then another and so on until I had discovered between six and eight ready-made masterpieces just waiting to be transferred to some large painting surface and executed comfortably and effortlessly. As I continued to look for more (I was indeed greedy) other blocks appeared less promising or satisfactory and then as I looked at more and more of them ahead of me and to the right and left I found them even less and less interesting and ultimately devoid of all attractiveness. Suddenly I heard footsteps down the hall for the secretary had left the door open and I seemed to recognize the footfall as that of my lawyer friend. In the few moments left to me for contemplation of a sort that would be difficult to explain to anyone else I hurriedly trained my gaze on the truly fine compositions I had noted, only to find that they had disappeared entirely and all of the blocks had become equally uninteresting and commonplace.

Although I was somewhat disappointed at being so suddenly confronted by nothing at all I was not really confounded nor puzzled. I had given the matter of perception a good deal of thought and had actually written fragmentary notes on the tricks our minds and our senses could play on us. Here had been a moment when my mind, idling in neutral, had invested some creative imagination into a view of what was essentially commonplace and uninteresting. I had established, while the energy lasted, certain relationships between shapes that were not there but that could have been there or that could be construed from the thousand rather neutral possible relations of those spots, blobs and rivers or streaks of light and dark. This activity that could be called “creative” seeing and what is responsible for the artist’s vision is essentially a split second activity of the mind. The attention span is short and when the mental and sensual tension is fatigued, the event, for the time being, is over and whatever was seen or perceived must be brought back to or brought again to consciousness, slowly and often painfully.

Artists and undoubtedly non-artists as well have studied marks and stains and clouds long, long before Leonardo da Vinci advised his students and artists in general to study smoke and dampness stains on the walls because “one could find so many glorious compositions in these chance shapes. (This is not an exact quote.)” (II, 9-10).

For Holty to recreate the immediacy of the non­representational images that he intended to use, it was necessary to yield to the medium, rather than forcing his will upon it. He realized that by drawing he could most likely attain the necessary handling skills as well as store up a fund of ideas for use in paintings. These began with literal images such as a tree form that were used only for initial stimulation, but later, his work became entirely improvisational. The first process he described, as follows:

Using older black-ink drawings I had done years ago, I worked with tempera white and transparent (thinned out) ink washes to find as many single tree-form compositions as I could find, making, I might add, every possible use of the accidents that occurred as I was working. I managed to come up with about 100 drawings or variations. But why should I use a tree of all things, I asked myself? After all, it was only one way of establishing certain shapes on a diagonal axis, to be fused with the vertical and horizontal axis of the rectangle. The Cubists had done this with simple geometrical planes 50 years ago. My answer was that the tree form in its endless variety provided impulses and inspiration for changes away from this matrix form that no other forms I could manage would give me (fig. 9).

Even as he approached pure abstraction, “form memories accumulated over the years [would] make sudden and unbidden appearances,” the artist said, but he was “not embarrassed by the possible suggestions of such forms.” Indeed, Holty often cultivated such appearances (fig. 10) without accepting “their suggestion to develop them in any other way than as aesthetic contributions to the final stage of the picture.” Whether or not these forms appeared, the process was improvisational, even when he was working over older drawings, and the final solution was abstract, as the artist recounted when doing further drawings:

I did some drawings with water-thinned indelible ink on a smooth type of drawing paper. All work was done with the brush, no pen, and there was little possibility to control the drawing, as the strokes of the brush stained the paper on contact and could not be washed away. The improvisations, for that is what they were, demanded that the work be done with great rapidity. I had some pictorial ideas to begin with, but the material took over and forced my hand, literally. If I came within hailing distance of what I had hoped to do in one drawing, I tried in a subsequent one to do better, but the second drawing took off by itself and had hardly any relationship to the first. My only guide in the work was a pencil-line frame, about half an inch from the edges of the paper sheet, and I raced by brush to that line and tried never to cross it. At first the drawings were darker and I tried to retain, and did so, certain white spots or shapes of untouched paper. [fig. 11] Later the drawings became lighter and I no longer cared about preserving anything that looked like a preconceived design. The drawings became a sea of gray washes and brush strokes, and I had no other aim than to get down the movements and counter movements, diagonal and vertical horizontal, and to enjoy the sheer abandon of the activity.

It took years for Holty to reach a similar simplicity as well as boldness of surface in his paintings, as will be seen in this passage:

At best, my work in the late 1930s and early 1940s was considered “interesting” and serious, but also over­problematic and over-conscientious. It was only in the middle 1950s that I began to realize both my own limitations and at the same time the probable limitations of the kind of painting I wanted to do most. To some extent I began to drift with the tide of Abstract painting at this period. I was in harmony with what might be called the composite image of the painting of that time. I had sympathy both for the substantial qualities to be found in a painter like Mark Rothko, and I realized the improvisatory values in the more compulsive paintings of a de Kooning or of a Tobey (the exploder and the writer of a picture.)

To emulate the latter type of free composition was, of course, more difficult for me because of my rather pedantic temperament, but it was worth all the effort it cost me to learn to know the other side of freedom. At last a 30-year gap between sketches and essays and the more complete work of the present days began to close, but working at “simple” or apparently simple compositions as I do today requires more concentrated efforts than are called for in more complicated pictures. The simple and direct approach has this virtue, however: that [the non­representational artist] deals less and less with illusionistic values (air-atmosphere of color and nuances [fig. 12] (I, 82-83).

What then . . . are the possibilities left to the non-representative painter, what can he work with and what for since he has cut himself away from the world his detractors hold inalienable in art? Color, shape, movement, all these remain for him to deal with. He can make use of light as no artist before him could do and he can give expression to all impressions his senses perceive and register all moods his poetic soul dictates. He can explore not only the hues and tones of color but its very nature itself.

He can, in effect, create the equivalent of symphonies in color or compress all means into a deceptive simplicity that is more succinct than a Haiku poem [fig. 13] (III, 6).

Holty separated himself from the “trick devices” of the Abstract Expressionists, their “sea of paints and gummy textures that suggest a thousand illusions—[and achieve a] unity of confusion” (I, 20). He aimed for their anathema, the “succinct” image (I, 119). “No truly succinct statement ever permitted this [so-called] ‘freedom’, this approximation,” he wrote (I, 50). On the other hand, there was all the difference in the world between the succinct statement and the barren one: “The simple statement in art has always been attacked as a reductionism that threatens to leave out of the work not only what is unessential but what is essential as well and in any one given direction simplification has its limits” (III, 43). Holty believed that Barnett Newman had gone too far: “he hides nothing, but . . . reveals nothing either” (I, 20). He mused further: “The success of the simple or ’empty’ picture (ancient Chinese or modern) depends to a great extent on what the artist has to leave out of the painting, but it is also of importance what he puts into it. His renunciation must be based on wealth, not bankruptcy” (I, 83).

Holty wished also to partake of the “truly monumental,” (I, 119) by returning to the archaic forms that he found so compelling, before they were shaped into the representational images that grew from them. His aim became, then, to maintain their authority by placing one or more of these forms into a format dominated by one large shape, “enriched by subdivision and embellishment,” while at the same time achieving “complete integration of movement, form, and space.” The artist most often stated himself dryly, but there were intervals of pyrotechnics, as when he concluded this thought:

The answer, as always, is the total gestalt, color and shape, but if the spirit is free enough the failed effort can be converted to success by another firing of all the guns in disregard of previous steps taken. That is in line with my theory of permanent improvisation. . . . Sometimes the beginning is complete. Sometimes the procedure of going over what is there will bear fruit. . . .

To come to one’s wits end is often enough the beginning of the real painting and despair is more often than not only fatigue. Mondrian often said that one should not work too much. The fresh and well rested eye is a fine creative instrument.

While Holty’s teaching stints were highly successful educational investments for the institutions involved and helped him maintain a modicum of financial stability, they caused much interruption to his life and career. He managed to exhibit fairly steadily in New York City, but the many peregrinations outside of the City probably led to the need to change galleries from time to time as well as the equivocating response he received from reviewers. Holty reacted to one, fairly typical review, as follows:

These have not been good days for me these last weeks. The backhanded, flippant dismissal of my exhibition in New York by the newspaper reviewers had a more discouraging effect on me than it should have had. Perhaps the gloomy grey, wet autumn days have something to do with it, but I am distraught and find it difficult just to concentrate on writing a letter. I cannot be too disturbed about the opinions of my work, held by the reviewers referred to, because I hold them in no particular regard and feel that when ever they utter a truth or near truth, it is something like a blind chicken finding a corn. Nevertheless, the fact remains that one has presented or projected one’s self and the image has been seen and judged differently than was expected and this calls for introspection and review. . . .

Whatever the virtues of criticism may be, it is precisely the animose critic who, no matter who he is or what he says or for what reason he says it, forces a re­ thinking. If one were to take critical remarks as one cold the criticism of the design of. a water closet, one might improve on the work criticized by alterations, but this is impossible in matters of imagery. If work such as mine was, as it was, declared only color exercises for pictures yet to be painted—such pictures do not appear in mind because they are not here and that is no criticism. It is simply a rejection of the work. They are pictures all right as they are, and the critic only sees color exercises. . . . So, in turn, I reject the critic.

It is true, of course, that the studio is my kingdom and the work mine by “divine” right, in this case, but an honest and reflective man will admit that happiness with one’s work (and I have been reasonably happy with my work and its direction, its content and its emerging form for some years, now) can lead to a certain selbstgefalligkeit, a certain uncritical narcissism that can be injurious. (I, 221-223)

The artist’s continuing financial difficulties, coupled with a near-fatal burn accident that hospitalized his wife for several weeks caused him to be unusually brooding for periods during the early 1960s. He also became somewhat fatalistic about his work, even as he was more confident of it. He wrote Howard Thomas (who had married Anne Wall in 1960, after his wife Mary died in 1959) about the physical and emotional strains of visits to the hospital and taking care of himself—even though he had always done that whenever his wife was away. He also mentioned the problems of trying to get to and from school (Hunter College at this time) during a bus strike that lasted four weeks, of the loss of painting time on his teaching days, and of the medical costs he was struggling under after his insurance ran out. Then, he went into a more constructive discussion of his work:

Nevertheless I have accomplished some things and I have ordered quantities of material (stretchers and canvas) for a late spring and summer painting campaign because I know that I must realize the experience of a lifetime in a very few years. Right or wrong I had planned it that way from early youth, i.e. to acquire complete clarity first and then to forget all I had painted and get at the mature work in earnest. I have no more problems in art, the ideas are right and I am completely confident, but and it is a big but, there is always a long step from the clarity of the idea to the realization of a picture. It’s still work all the way no matter how simple the idiom you work in and I surely work simply now. My biggest difficulty has always been to accept the material limitations of painting. After all when we think or dream of colors these are without weight, density or pigmental considerations when we paint, or at least when I do, I am always dismayed to find myself confronted with colored grease (oils of course) and although I know all the answers (intellectually) I am often at a loss emotionally. This is particularly true because some colors such as blue or light green come closer to the mental image than others do and the other colors are more mundane than these and must be dealt with. In the last years I have overcome (temporarily) the problem by painting exceedingly thin—too thin for permanence and too fragile. From that transparency to any solidity is too long a step. I have observed in the work of a neighbor that he arrives at any virtues my incomplete method may have by painting solidly but wet in wet, at least at the first go, i.e., blending the colors on the canvas and I plan to adopt his procedure if I can break my own habits (always easily come by and difficult to shake off). I have been practicing this on smaller canvases with some success and I am beginning to suspect that I will have to enlarge my equipment (larger brushes and a much larger palette all set to discharge all the guns at a sitting. Sometimes it’s as simple as that. (HT, 4\15\62)

At times, the artist became very specific in discussing paintings, although he rarely, if ever, mentioned one by name:

I am definitely not content with the “start” (for that is what I now see it as) of that large 56” x 70” I did the other day. I am afraid that one coat of white paint over the prime is just not enough. There is no body to work on and when I want to rub away the surface of dry paint, the action doesn’t produce anything like a satisfactory result. Also, and this is most important—these images must be stated in two colors immediately, i.e., the white areas must be destroyed—even if at the end of the painting these will end up by being painted white again. Only this way can the nature of painting vs drawing be preserved. The white must be at hand for purposes of correction and I must correct or change the big form in the large canvases with the same freedom as I correct them in the smaller ones. One should be able to work at a painting as though one were kneading dough. I don’t revoke the idea of putting down the big form statement in one or another color immediately, but I add the proviso that it be countered right away by the addition of an opposing color that will modify the original impact and permit a simplification by enrichment rather than by immediate elimination, or still worse, through the correction or embellishment of the silhouette. (I, 122)

After the form was resolved, there was the color:

The red one is better but the form seems too high at the top end and the color is bricky and lifeless. The black and brown one is so far the most promising, i.e., it is possible to lighten the general tone without going over the whole surface with white and re-washing the entire form. It seems to be a matter of paint application that looms as the big obstacle in this work but I doubt very much that that is the real problem after all. A plan so simple as the one I have in mind must be complex in execution or rather in content, otherwise the result will be banal and empty. There is still one virgin canvas of the same dimensions to cover and if only one of the four comes out well, I will know what the others require.

One thing is certain. I must work on a somewhat better ground because an over-absorbent ground causes the first washes to be scratchy and when the paint dries it loses color and becomes lifeless despite the cadences of light and dark. My young neighbor thought the form problem was solved. The scale was right but the next task was a matter of color. But color is also a place and colors can not be injected wilfully or arbitrarily into an already existing form. (I, 143-144)

Then, the non-specific:

I am desperate about my painting now but not desperate for the dramatic or the novel but rather for light and the most delicately controlled movement and for me quite new color relationships, neither tonal nor fruity but truly lyrical and all related to very light grays, both cool and warm. In the process of work all sorts of half or three quarter images of representational nature come up (doesn’t bother me), none of which can be complete because there is no space or perspective concept provided for any complete realization of such images but after a point, and with some luck, real abstract images do materialize and that is what I am after and I have hit the target often enough to be confident of reasonable achievement.

Because a friend of mine suggested that I do so and because most of my pictures are light, I painted some dark ones but I shall not do any more of them—because I don’t want to and I don’t feel that I have to explain or defend what I do by demonstrating competence in any other manner than in the one I choose to. (HT, 6\22\67)

Having the right studio as well as the right equipment was always important to Holty, so he moved frequently, from Harlem to Soho. His next-to-last studio, on Mercer Street in Soho, prompted several essays, such as the following on the district, getting there from his apartment on Central Park West, and the effect of the new space on his work. First, Soho, itself:

An area comprising roughly some sixteen square blocks of partially abandoned industrial loft buildings is now tenanted, according to the latest count of heads, by some 3000 painters and sculptors. The streets, with the exception of West Broadway, are narrow and forbiddingly grim in appearance and they are dirty. Enough of industry is left in this quarter to provide the street surfaces with a litter of cardboard and other packaging remnants to make them unsightly, but even if they were cleaned the stark and unattractive character of the buildings, those giant stone boxes, would remain as a testimonial of that industrial ugliness America inherited from the cities of England.

At this point, the artist described in great detail the means, by underground subway transfers, of getting to the studio each day, including waiting at local stations for the express trains to pass¬—pushing air ahead of them with “the violence of a high wind, cold in winter of course and fetid and warm in milder weather.” A trip upward on a long escalator in the station where he transferred subway lines at 34th Street subway brought an observation on “the grotesque nature of modern city life” that required passing “through composite worlds—that of Piranesi, the late renaissance drawer of vast interiors, and that of the futurist architect Sant­Elia whose plans for a modern city are pretty darned well realized here.” He described the people on the escalator as “moving up or down like the targets in a shooting gallery, and when the up-escalator debouches its human cargo the persons move to their various destinations rather silently and purposefully as though drawn there by a magnet.” There was, “God knows, noise enough but it is all mechanical—the rush of the trains, the squeaking of brakes, and the clicking of turnstiles.” After practicing “a form of self-hypnosis and determined isolation from all other fellow sufferers present,” Holty would finally arrive at his stop, only a couple of blocks from his studio. “But in that short distance,” he said, “I have to pick my way between dolly pushers and great bulky trucks partially parked on the sidewalks to make room for the through traffic, and I often have to walk around bulky merchandise right in front of the door of the carpenter shop above which I have my place.” Also, the people he passed responded as if in a small town, rather than a major city. Strangers, as well as “janitors, building superintendents, and working men in the street” spoke to the artist as if they were old friends (making him think that he might have missed his calling of being a politician). “So I have many to greet and pass the time of day with before I get to the very door of our establishment,” the artist wrote, and continued:

I enter the building through the carpenter shop and there I find myself in more familiar and agreeable surroundings. Despite the new-fangled power saws and polishing equipment, a carpenter shop has something ageless about it, and the different carpenters in their work postures seem to have something classical about them. The sight is agreeable and brings me a good deal closer to my own non-practical endeavors on the floor above. I go up the stairs unless one of the carpenters who happens to be my landlord runs me up on the freight elevator, a hand-pull affair too stiff for me to enjoy running myself, so that if that young man is otherwise occupied I take to the staircase.

Entering the studio is a pleasure because the room is high ceilinged, white and, except on very gray days, bathed in a beautifully diffused light. But the very work I did the day before appears strange to me. It is not as though a canvas had been put away for a long while and then taken out again for purposes of reflection, in which case there is a certain alienation between the maker and the made, but the distance I feel now is because the long journey through the strange modern world I have been travelling in and through has built walls between what I might say is my purpose and aim and the forced environment of a daily existence that doesn’t seem to relate to what I practice in relative solitude in any way.

It seems the height of the ridiculous to spend millions of dollars on a transport system merely to carry a painter of pictures from his residence to his work six miles away. Of course one might entertain the idea of living down there in Soho as many, one could say most of the artists do, but as far as I am concerned it is just too gloomy and depressing. In the fifty years that I have known the New York art scene, I have witnessed the brutal shunting around of artists by real estate interests and entrepreneurs of various kinds, from Brownstone flats to Brownstone basements, to empty and abandoned storefronts, to broken-down industrial buildings. In each instance the artists have done their best to make the holes and crevices permitted them in a modern city as pleasant and habitable as possible, doing pretty well all they could via coffee shops and hospitable bars and saloons to create a decent and warmly human atmosphere in which the social animal might live as well as exist. Those who are young enough derive, I am sure, a certain satisfaction and pleasure from this romantic ambiance. When I was young and living in the Washington Square neighborhood, not too far from where I am located now, I too had a warm feeling for the cocoon we had woven and a certain feeling of security that came from feeling that there was a confraternity and that one was among friends. I no longer feel this, and while I am happy to accept the practical aspects of the situation I resist and reject the romance. I have the feeling that the adventure of the work is unhappily related to a physical basis of no support of permanence whatsoever and all one can do is to play each day’s existence by ear. (VI, 1016-1021)

From 1955-59, Holty had held the position of Instructor of Fine Arts at Brooklyn College, New York, where he enjoyed association with a group of colleagues including art historian Milton Brown, head of the department, and painters Jimmy Ernst, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Jay Wolff, and Harry Holtzman. After serving residencies at Milwaukee and Louisville from 1961-63, he returned to Brooklyn College in 1964 as Professor of Fine Arts, a position that gave him not only the security of tenure but benefits that would continue his salary during retirement and, for his family, after his death. On retirement in 1970, the artist reminisced on these last few years of teaching:

The early events of this year descended on me rather rapidly and also unexpectedly, beginning with the sudden termination of my professorial position at Brooklyn College. I knew that this was to be my last official year, but the date of my retirement was advanced from January of 1971 to September of 1970, i.e., the beginning of the Fall Semester, for by that time I will have reached my seventieth year. I was put on leave with full pay until September and I found myself taken out of the routine of the last ten years. My duties were light enough and I found it more and more difficult to teach the younger generation that, to me, seems to lack certain dimensions ordinarily considered requisite to qualify as social entities.

I had fewer difficulties with my students than most professors have because I made it known early that my interest in them and in their work rested entirely on their interest. I refused to quarrel with the rather naive and often offensive notions they entertained about themselves, their abilities and their programs—also what they considered their Constitutional rights when these rights were only privileges extended to them.

Each generation is born into its time and, long hair or short, all its members tend to conform. Like school­girl friends I remember, they wish to dress and look alike since it expresses their need for a show of solidarity. Youth is not an easy time of life when one wants so much and doesn’t even know half of the time what it is one wants. Of course there are always bright, if not particularly talented youngsters with whom conversation and even argument is refreshing. But I never felt that a knock-down, drag-out confrontation was worth the effort.

What I never could quite overcome as a teacher was when the students challenged me to sell myself, me and my teaching, to them. Here, whether they were pro- or anti­establishment, they proved themselves the true offspring of a people that divides the world into customers and purveyors and they invoked the right to demand what they had no right to. demand, i.e., proof positive that what they were to be taught was worth their efforts to cooperate. There is not an ounce of humility in them and they thrust aside all those matters of value that might make them somewhat ashamed of their impertinence. History was of no value and they declared themselves done with it. There were no lessons to be learned from anything excepting their everyday experience. This rather stupid dismissal of wisdom they feel makes it an even match and they are quite unaware of the fact that what they feel is an exemption is, in effect, a penalty.

In a way I felt relieved to get out of those hideous winter trips to Brooklyn College, but I didn’t escape the severe winter weather of early 1970 after all. Days of inaction at the studio followed because the days were too lightless and the studio too cold. It had never really been properly sealed against the weather and those lovely high windows let in a lot of cold air and then, to top it off, I was invited to teach at Brandeis University as a visiting teacher for some four weeks, from mid-March to mid-April to be exact. I was allowed to work for anyone in the world except for the City of New York, so I contracted to go up one day a week for four weeks (terms of the arrangement).

Now that that is all over with I am trying to get some work done and it has been like pulling teeth. After the most tenacious and brutal winter it now seems that spring may be here after all. . . .

A number of things have transpired in the last weeks, but I don’t know whether I can establish the chronological order and I doubt that I can separate these facts of events from the painting problems continually on my mind. Likewise, the importance of what happened is hard to judge, the trivial from what seems meaningful, again because of my subjective attitude. It is as though a day dreamer just sitting and voyaging in his mind were being asked questions by someone. He is not attuned to conversing for the moment, even less to doing justice to what has been asked of him, and when he finally emerges from his reverie he can hardly remember what the person who has interrupted him has said or tell the difference between what would or would not have interested him had he been listening.

I do remember that I had been absolved from further jury duty because of my age and I do remember my visit to the Retirement Board of the City University because both of those items contributed somewhat to liberating my thinking about the painting. Two problems emerged from the realm of speculation into the real world. The first, the jury business is settled and the second can now be resolved. I am now haunted only by the project of severing my relations with the Graham Gallery and getting my pictures the hell out of there without argument and fuss as to what belongs to whom. That job should be undertaken in June as the gallery will probably be closed in July.

A museum curator friend of mine, Mr. Richard Hirsch, has arranged for a possible exhibition of some of my work in Texas, and I am now corresponding with the owner of a gallery in Austin, a Mr. Hickey.12 The negotiations will take some time for he must be furnished with slides of recent work and a price list of sorts. While this is a pleasant perspective as such and while I should look about for a place to exhibit in New York City, these projects seem of lesser interest to me as the painting itself seems of such paramount importance to me at this time. My Germanic side, the one that searches for the Grail and will not settle for less, has me in its clutches. I know that this vaporous dream will have to descend to corporeal reality before there are any fruits, but for the moment I am obsessed with dreams of excellence and pictorial glory, with dozens of paintings in mind and the inability to separate one from the others long enough to concentrate on the doing. As the French-German painter Hans von Maraes confessed in a letter to a lady admirer, “I want so much to do and do not know what it is I want—there my Dear the truth is out” (VI, 1021-1025).

When Holty took his work away from the Graham Gallery, he found an earlier painting that caused reflection on its qualities as opposed to his present painting:

I felt that I was certainly not painting now in a qualitative manner to match that very light but very strong canvas. The title, as usual pulled in by the hair, is “Moon Runner,” suggested by a stain that resembles a large loping (Indian style) runner. The moon (there is no moon) is, or was suggested by the silver gray, white, and light violet blue of the colors. The first depression on seeing this picture again was followed by a second one when I took another look at it at the studio. After a moment’s admiration, my eye went to the one unsolved area at the upper right of the picture and as the earlier pleasure plus self admiration was succeeded by a second depression, I conceded that the painting was not the true answer to prayer.

It’s an old story for every artist who parts with the work he. has done convinced that it is not what he hoped it would be, and then after not seeing it for a long time finds that it is really good—until he notes the shortcomings he has forgotten along with the picture itself. There must be artists who are content with their work. Apparently I am condemned not to be one of them, and so looking over the small sketches and happy improvisations I conclude (I must) that my vision after all is right and good but that I lack the strength to realize that vision on a larger and more ambitious scale.

Confession comes easily at the moment because my mood is certainly contrite. To use a phrase I don’t particularly care for, “lets face it,” this has not been my year. It’s almost a year now since I started working in the new studio, so much pleasanter than the old one, easier to reach than the old one, but not yet blessed by consistent good work. (VI, 1039)

The work was sure to come, in literary as well as visual form. The artist continued writing his journals, but he also completed one book and started another in collaboration with his friend, the painter Romare Bearden. He described the first book, entitled The Painter’s Mind, as a teaching book. It was used as such by his contemporaries, such as Vaclav Vytlacil, who required it of each of his students, but apparently, the time for dissertations on artistic structure had passed among younger professors, and the sales did not go well. Holty commented to the Thomases on the second book, while it was in progress:

The new book Bearden and I are writing contains all the thoughts we have on the subject of “Vision and Form,” right down to the moment. This essay is largely philosophical and historical and does not deal with technical matters. Form here is only descriptive of the styles that proclaim the Vision of an artist, or when it is possible to see them collectively—of artists in historical perspective.

We avoid, whenever possible the reference to art itself (what it truly is, a ray of light let into the heart through the eyes, an enrichment of the emotions rather than of the intellect) because the most profound statements about Art, even when true sound banal and pretentious.

As usual, after an outline agreed upon, I initiated the flow and sequence of the text but Bearden has contributed mightily in embellishing and polishing the work. He is very talented you know and now that he has sloughed off the banalities and cliches he was saddled with when and while he was writing welfare reports, he has unfolded a wealth of poetic imagery that impresses me indeed. (HT, 10\22\70)

During his last few years, Holty entered what he had earlier referred to as “the old age of a painter.” Cribbing from Shakespeare, he spoke of an artist’s nursery period, his training period, his career period, and then his “old age period,” when he rises above conscious worry about technical problems or the opinions of others about his work. This period had its obligations, however, requiring “a suppleness of mind and spirit and a flexibility in the altered approaches and re-approaches of the work, itself.” As usual, Holty opened up to the Thomases who, being artists, he knew would understand:

The big and seemingly eternal problem is the constant re-structuring of paintings that I want to appear not to be structured at all, that I want to have appear as color poems. There is nothing unreal about such aspirations but they are difficult to realize and are much easier to carry in fantasy than to execute. Not only the canvas and the tyranny of the four corners are hurdles to overcome but the damned brush itself has two edges. The stain will do so much and no more and while I am attracted by some of the work of the minimal painters with their pulsating allover surfaces I know that those results would not please me if I did only what they do. When matters go well, as they do at present, there is no anguish but when they don’t all the intellectual scheming is for naught and one is like a monkey on a stick. At any rate one learns about humility and little by little to accept what is there or given and not fret eternally about the gap between what one hoped for and what (and it is little enough) one has actually accomplished. (HT, 5\3\71)

A few weeks later, Holty wrote again to the Thomases:

It has been a rather wonderful summer for me, not only because of the financial success and the acquisition of new and young collectors or because of Mrs. Poindexter’s elegant invitation to exhibit in her gallery (early in ’72) but, and mainly because of the new paintings, all of them in Blues—or yellows or red and gray. At present I am producing only the blue ones and, if I say so myself, these are good. All of them, six in number have been painted twice i.e. whited over once and re-done and they are getting freer and freer as I move along, the overall color movements eliminating all that is pattern with the accents that give the work style, appearing as I go along and not as a preconceived thing. I make countless small sketches (9” x 12”) and use them as models for the large canvases, not as compositions to be enlarged. (What a difference the approach makes and I paint out the little ones that make little or no sense—and go on to others.

To keep my color eye refreshed from the monochrome (it really isn’t that) of the blue pictures I have a lot of exercises in multicolor on other small panels. I took about twenty-five of these (let me call them losses) and painted one rectangle of a color not present in them somewhere on top of what was there. I taped out this rectangle and filled it with a flat color and the results have been marvelous. Naturally that colored rectangle had to produce an immediate visual impact. If the color was wrong or the rectangle not the right size, the color and the size had to be corrected. The results are astonishing. Unlike Mr. Hofmann’s and Mr. Albers’s rectangles these (and there is but one in each picture) this artificial void brings the surface to a new life but is definitely part of the painting. I imagine one can trace this device to the Persians. The fact that they put lettering into their geometric rects, and I do not do so, does not alter the fact of the relationship. These exercises are for me, and I do not fear to exhibit them and invite the stupid comparisons such an action would undoubtedly bring about. I am refreshing my eye and it is for my reasons that I do this.

At my age, I am quite sure I shall not be able to enlarge my color range, but I hope to be able to make more of what is there now. When I get to the end of my tether with the blue pictures as I certainly must I will be going on to some paintings in browns and yellows not for variety’s sake but only because I will have gotten sick to death of the blues. The content or subject matter is of course “light” abstracted in a new way. I strive for harmony and I aim to please the eye—nothing more. . . .

I hope that what I have written of my new work doesn’t sound overbearing. My head is not swollen or turned despite the astonishing amount of praise the new paintings have received from the colleagues that have seen them.

What I really feel so good about is the ‘way’ not the result because tomorrow is still the day that counts. (HT, 9\10\71—this was the last letter written by Holty to Howard and Anne Thomas; he answered Anne Thomas’s letter telling of her husband’s death on November 9, 1971)

A studio visit a month later by a young friend and colleague, Jeffrey Hoffeld, resulted in this rumination on a particular aspect of his work:

I showed Hoffeld, who teaches at Brooklyn College and is at the present time Assistant Curator of Medieval Art at the Metropolitan Museum, a position he plans to retire from in June, the large and smaller blue pictures of the late summer, and also the very small canvases where I had introduced, rather arbitrarily colored rectangles. These exercises that were inspired by what I had considered Hans Hofmann’s misunderstanding of the problem, were not painted to be exhibited, certainly not in my lifetime, and I have no intentions to develop them on a larger scale. As far as I am concerned, I have made my point and should I do more of these exercises, it will only add to their number. Some will appear better than others because the relationship of the rectangles to what is already there will be more fortuitous but they will all exist within the same limitations.

The particular panels I choose for these “stunts,” as I like to think of them, are ones in which there is a good deal of movement and a variety of colors but not much definition of form or shape. They are painted on canvases cut from larger abandoned pictures. These are cut up into regular pieces as one might cut the pieces from a pan of chocolate fudge. . . .

Not all my 9” by 12” canvases are cut out of old pictures. In recent years I have painted numerous series of them from scratch as studies for more ambitious work. Should anyone care to know why the largest dimension of the panels is 12”—the answer is simple. Twelve inches in any direction will establish the maximum size that can be taken in by the average eye without a shift of focus so that the artist may oversee the whole effort easily. These panels, because of this limitation in dimension, are to be seen as miniatures rather than as small pictures although they often appear to partake of monumentality when they seem to be large pictures seen through the reverse end of a telescope. Physically these tiny rectangles consist of small canvases glued to slightly larger pieces of masonite. . . .

By and large the several hundred small pictures still in my possession and the countless ones (at least I have never tried to count them) that are sold or gone as gifts to friends were begun or extrapolated from large pictures and are products of the last seventeen or eighteen years.

So there was a considerable gap in time between the original flirtation with chance to a more ardent wooing of it. In all those years there were times when the accidental took over the reins and other times when I was determined to impose a conscious will and did so. In the give and take involved in that alternate method much must have been lost or recognized tardily because I did not always understand what was good about this or that discovery. This was regrettable but I believe unavoidable in the jolting development of an artistic personality as complicated as mi my work is moving more and more into the direction of the sensory and the inspired one is. . . .

In another visit on the same afternoon, the artist Ted Myashita argued for the abstraction (as opposed to what sometimes seemed naturalistic in Holty’s paintings), but liked those that had more rather than less definition. Myashita’s candidly expressed opinions caused Holty to continue the argument after the visitor left, telling himself that he liked the paintings that were

less definite to [Myashita] but only incomplete to me as I am trying to arrive at a totally different context of the elements involved, as follows:

Not to go deeply here in discussing my intentions, my objective is to push the non-conceptual and accidental to a point where the result becomes absolute in its own terms, inevitable and final from its very beginnings. If I can attain what I hope to, then the work will transcend the elements within it and the whole will once more become more than the sum of its parts above and beyond analysis and discussion.

This admittedly is still only vision and intention, but there is nothing wrong about it though others can not be expected to understand the in-between stage the work is in and only the fait accompli might convince the observer. I believe that putting matters in an entirely new and different context is the way the older artist progresses. Our learning capacity is limited, so are our developable skills. The real skill is the ability to hide the fact that we are not as skillful as others might think we are by artistic acts of transcendence. Goya drew as well at eighteen as he did at eighty. The secret of his art is that he transcended himself by doing other (therefore and for no other reason) things with his gifts, gaining artistic strength at the loss of facility and competence in earlier context.

To Myashita’s complaint that Holty took his color to extremes (“browns and grays, reds and greys or yellows and grays to say nothing of the canvases painted only in blues”), the artist countered:

The only answer I could honestly give was that the colors worked by seduction and that after I had ministered to my hunger for colors, as I occasionally did, I became disenchanted with the more opulent means and reverted to simple color arrangements what were satisfying and allowed me to do certain things not available to the colorist, i.e., the use of nuances and contrasts of translucencies with opacities. The reasons for working one way or another are actually too subjective for profitable argument. One always comes out exactly where one has gone in. One thing is certain, to employ full colors the forms should be defined in their silhouette, otherwise one creates a fruit salad. Working in the vague spots, as I do at present, denying design and shape by themselves, bright coloration in an all over sense, defeats my purpose by confusing the issue.

When Myashita had agreed to a trade of canvases with Holty and chose one that he insisted on turning upside down, Holty found himself doubting that artist’s “feeling for calligraphy, which, after all, is based on the alternation between energy and fatigue in the artist as he is at work, also in his feeling for space.” Holty continued in his reflections:

Perhaps there is even less universality in feeling and means than I have begun to suspect there is — or isn’t.

If one proceeds from the thesis, and I do, that all our harmonies, our sense of balance and of space, solid or void, can be traced back to our desire for well being, for equilibrium and for a unity that will put us at our ease, the question still remains as to just what arrangement will satisfy one person, one people or one race and what arrangement or disposition of the elements in a picture will do the same for another. Is what we call our desire for comfort or ease of the soul equal for all? Is it possible that those who would be comfortable at all costs respond to a more conventional arrangement and are those who prefer the stimulus and excitement of the unusual or atypical or even incomplete, less interested in the pacifying or the static quality than in the dynamic? If that is so, the argument is removed to the realm of the subjective and the dispute gravitates to the limbo of the unresolved.

When Myashita had declared that he accepted any artistic offering, “even a minor one, to the art of our time,” Holty averred that he rejected any gesture of “avowed anti-art,” as well as the “minor contributions that consist of trivial but often unique work, [and found that he was] inclined to favor only the art that reveals to me an affinity with what to me is timeless, whether successfully resolved or evidently intentional to that end and aim.” What he had learned from the “avatars of modern art,” which he still applied to his own work, “for the peace of my soul and for my own creative process,” he did not reject but that was not true with “the over-rated role of innovation per se,” along with “the craze for the novel,” which had “indeed enlarged the scope of the art activity much as pumping too much air into a balloon until it becomes ever larger and finally, before bursting, it becomes transparent and reveals the emptiness of its inside.” Concluding that “all progress, even such as this, is purchased at a price; all gains are offset by a loss—in this case, the nature of the art of painting itself” led Holty into one of his most eloquent passages concerning timeless art:

Painting, when it is art, reveals a whole world seen as it has never been seen before. The outer garment, the face revealed changes; its nature, never. One has only to study a hundred or a thousand wall-painted, well­ constructed still-life paintings competently rendered by masters of the trade—Dutch, Spanish, French, or whatever—and then look at a Chardin to recognize that the first are respectable accomplishments, the Chardin, a great painting, a work in which the art makes the difference between the whole and the sum of the parts. One forgets too often that art itself does not progress, having been, to paraphrase Whistler, “from the beginning.” The means must be changed but not for their own sake, only to provide a flow of new waters for one cannot bathe in the same stream twice.

The aim to purify, to transcend is part of the dream of man, not ever to be completely realized in a tangible purity or pure style nor in a final thrust of the spirit that would liberate man from himself once and forever. If such were possible, it would not mean the end of art that some think will. and should come about. It would mean the end of time. There would be no yesterdays and, what is more, there would be no tomorrows. (December 29, 1971)

Less than a month after studio visits cited above, Holty discovered that he would have to find yet another studio:

For one thing, I found out that I would have to vacate my studio. My carpenter landlord and his wife are moving to more comfortable quarters and they have found a tenant for the whole loft—so, out I go. The date for removal was to be early in February which would have been more than inconvenient for me. It would have been disastrous what with an exhibition coming up in March, a larger one to be prepared for the fall of the year, and other commitments to show paintings. I face the problem of keeping together such work as is in the studio; the little matter of painting, of continuing the work in the evening of life being for the moment of secondary consideration. After a rather disappointing search for another place, one was eventually found—a studio loft on East 22nd Street, a few blocks from my old studio on 24th and Park Avenue South. I did try to find a place uptown but failed to do so, and the outlook for a place near our home was black and though the date of removal from Mercer Street was retarded until March, there wasn’t any time to fritter away. I am grateful that everything wasn’t any worse and the major objective, keeping everything together, will be attained. Furthermore, a good friend, the one who located the studio for me, is a tenant in the building and so I shall have a neighbor.

All of this, losing the studio, worrying about the situation (the worst part of it), and finding the new space was played out during a mid-semester vacation period so that I could concentrate on the problem. But concentration means little in a case such as this; only luck counts and in the end I was lucky in a modest sort of way. I have not found the studio of my dreams; it will do, and that is that. (VI, 2097-2098)

As usual, the necessarily pragmatic things that Holty had to do to prepare for an exhibition, scheduled at Poindexter’s early in 1972, brought on passages that looked beyond the daily necessities:

My paintings suffered quite a good deal of photography recently. George De Sabato made a dozen or so color slides for me that he says turned out very well with one light and one dark slide of each painting available. Then the official photographer of the Poindexter Gallery came and took some black-and-white pictures and one in color, this to be used for announcing the exhibit coming up. My next chore will be signing all the completed canvases, a task I do not relish. I wish the signature to be clear and legible but not obtrusively visible, and I often sign and wipe out a signature several times until it is just about where I want it to be. I still believe the signature and other information should be written or printed on the back of the canvas but the people or the public, whatever you want to call those who look, do not care to consult the reverse side of the canvas unless, of course, it is a costly work of art, in which case the provenance is of more importance than the picture. I have seen collectors, their advisors in attendance, and the art dealer concerned walk up to a canvas by Juan Gris and without so much as a glance at it turn the painting around and spend minutes consulting the printed and written matter affixed to the back and, turning the canvas outward once more, walk away, again without looking at the picture, and repair to the office of the gallery to conclude whatever deal or business was involved. To judge from the satisfaction on the faces of all concerned, the interested party probably bought the painting.

I must admit that as I get older I yield more gracefully to the conventions of the trade. After all the only reason for continuing to work at an art is that one cannot stop. There is just no use complaining about the exploitation the artist suffers. He can’t help being what he is and he might as well resign himself to the idiocies of the concerns of those he must deal with. Recently a young man named Murdoch came to see me about an exhibition of what he called the geometric art of the 1930’s to be shown at a museum in Dallas, Texas, next fall. I showed him the few canvases made at that time that are still in my possession and advised him of a few others, where they are and how he might get in touch with their owners, and I also showed him a few replicas of lost and destroyed canvases I had painted recently for my own collection but, and though they were everything as good as the originals, they did not seem to qualify for the purposes of his exhibit. Mr. Murdock questioned me about the American Abstract artists and my participation in the Abstraction Creation group and I referred him to the Arno Press republication of all that material. He was acquainted with all this, and I guess his asking me about what he knew of anyway was just a matter of confirmation. I was just another witness to the facts. This seems to be standard art historical procedure. I have never quite understood it because it seems to me that if two liars could be made to tell the same lie, that would make it a truth. . . .

Mr. Murdock left me, satisfied it seems with his visit and I will hold the two authentic pictures he wishes to show for whenever he chooses to have them shipped. It goes without saying that he paid no attention whatever to the other paintings in the studio. I should have been most astonished had he done so. (VI, 2097-2101)

A few days later, Holty began to plan for the exhibition of his works to be held in the fall at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York:

I had lunch yesterday with Milton Brown and the lady dean of the Graduate Department of Art History at CUNY. She told me that she had been a student of mine at Hunter College about 10 years ago. I think that I remember her face but nothing else about her. Now she is the big wheel and we negotiated certain aspects of my fall retrospective. I was assured that the department had adequate storage space so that I will be able to send up all the pictures from the studio that do not go to the Poindexter Gallery for my March exhibit there. This is fine with me as I will only have to ship my painting gear, drawing cabinets and virgin canvases to the new studio on 22nd Street late this month. One thing is certain, I will not be painting again for at least six weeks. CUNY will pay for the lamination and presentation of the large figure drawings from 1925 and I will donate one of them to the City University Graduate Center. It is really high time that those large drawings are properly mounted, otherwise the cardboard they are on could dry out and fall apart. Considering the hot and cold storage they have suffered for almost 50 years, it is miraculous that they still exist in fairly good condition.

I showed Brown photographs of the 1923 drawings. Among them were also photos of two painted nude studies that caught Milton’s fancy. He said that these were painted as Phillip Pearlstein is now painting and he wants me to borrow them from their owners for the show. He also suggested a large show of my drawings to be hung in the Faculty lounge concurrent with the painting exhibit downstairs. Perhaps this exhibition will make waves after all. I find it ironic that the studies of my early years should now be taken so seriously. It does not speak well for the history of modern art that this is so and that I am regarded as one of the last professionals in the business. . . .

This business of being in assistance in arranging one’s own history such as is involved in putting together a retrospective or comprehensive exhibit of the work of a lifetime is somewhat depressing, a bit like being a witness to one’s own wake. As one digs into past events and tries to order matters for the historian and those preparing a catalogue, personal memories of no concern to the official functionaries surface and ask to be dealt with again or, rather, once more in the mind.

I cannot speak for others of my age, but where I am concerned I know that I have lived several lives in the fifty-year span since the first pictures I drew or painted. When I say “several lives,” I mean just that. While the pictures all flow into one another in the continuation of time, some were complete within themselves and the change of style or posture in the work reveals this compartmentalization. In retrospect one often wonders what the motivation force of the life could have been. It is easy enough to find out why one kept on drawing and painting, there being only one valid reason for that—because one could not stop. But the impulses or compulsions were not always the same. There were moments of true inspiration and moments of despair and emptiness when only naked ambition propelled one across the gulleys and crevasses of emptiness, a love affair perhaps and at times only the diversion and pastime of sex encounters, a smidgen of praise or the gratitude of a student to stroke the vanity ever avid for appreciation. One simply cannot estimate the relationship between causes and effects. Considerable progress in art can, it seems, be the result of what might appear as something of little consequence and great moments of consciousness may produce disproportionately little. For the peace of my soul I have avoided keeping notes on these matters, always taken the work itself seriously but not so the status of my person which I firmly hold is the proper attitude between what is fashioned and him who does the fashioning. But now as the supervising Deus ex Machina, I find myself stepping away from the life itself to get some sort of a perspective of the panorama as a whole in what I am inclined to believe will be a vain effort to see the whole in what I am inclined to believe will be a vain effort to see the whole as greater than the sum of its parts. (VI, 2104-2108)

During the Poindexter show, held in March, 1972, Holty held to his resolve to drop in only once per week, on Saturday afternoons. Few works were sold but both Mrs. Poindexter and he were pleased with the attendance, some of which evinced comments from the artist:

I enjoyed some of the visits with people who came in while I was at the gallery, particularly those with students from long ago who seem to have upgraded their opinions of me and my work considerably in the passing years and now recognize the master (my modesty aside) whom they did not hold in such regard in the past. I appreciated the favorable and knowledgeable criticism of Will Barnett who made me see consciously elements in my work that were not consciously conceived by me, proving in a way that my readiness to entertain chance and intuitive impulse was not a vain hope when I decided it was time to abandon fixed plan, to say nothing of preconceived pattern. Barnett pointed out the movement and surge of the paintings in a way I believe I could not have done even though I was in control of the work as I was painting. Perhaps this is because a neutral but sympathetic viewer can put into words what is not a matter of words at all to the performer while he is engrossed only in the visual aspects. Stapleton, who was with Barnett, said he remembered my saying years ago that there was nothing to a painting but what was to be seen on the surface of it. I still say that, and add that all the other things one may find hidden in a painting are subject to interpretation. I deny no one the right or pleasure to discover things not manifest to the naked eye. There would be little indeed in a work of art if an observer could not have a dialogue with the mysteries and the fact that in a work of art the whole is greater than the sum of its parts would not be the truth that it is. But, and it is a big but, all one can see is to be found in the surface one is looking at. This justifies the remark often made when debate about the possible meaning of a picture has ended in a deadlock that one should look at the canvas, just look at it for a change, and then go on or back to the interpretive discussions that revolve about possible meanings and so keep the seeing and the intellectual poeticizing in their respective places. (VI, 2147-2148)

A cocktail party held to honor the artist and one of his paintings on the same day induced these observations of the painting and of the gathering:

One of the reasons for this social gathering was to celebrate the Knellers’ acquisition of one of my paintings, the title of which is “The Emperor’s Garden,” which I thought looked well enough and kin to the later work in the matter of inner light of the picture plane. I am a rather avid devotee of that light that distinguishes the best in French painting and is different from paintings in which the light is such that is cast upon objects or the light that emanates from a source such as a lamp, the emerging sun, or other phenomena associated with the light of day or the lights of the night. The light I have in mind is created through the relationships in equilibrium of tones, tints and colors and whether pigmentally translucent or not has the quality of transparency and lightness at all times. The darkest colors at are swept along in the flow of light and become one with it. It is one of the rarest achievements in the art of painting, but it does not always appeal to the art lover who more often prefers a more dramatic effect such as is to be found in Turner’s pictures despite the vivid transparencies in his work. The French Impressionists at first fascinated by the English master later rejected him because they realized that he was not really one of them in the spirit of their art. . . .

Dr. and Mrs. Kneller introduced me to almost everyone they thought I might care to meet and I felt affectionately honored if one can say such a thing. The honoring I attribute to my age and perhaps to my professional seniority of yesterday, but the affection is another matter. Both the president and his wife [he was chancellor of the City University] seemed to regard me as one does some fabulous person who has done a great favor, like a doctor who has restored a grateful patient to good health or someone who has provided a great pleasure. It seems that my painting, certainly not one of the world’s masterpieces, is very meaningful to those two people. If that is so, it can be seen as a source of some satisfaction to the painter of it, but it is a fringe benefit to the creative person and does not inspire one to greater effort or console one for one’s failures. It is pleasant to be liked or even loved, but it is not surprising because one does gather the friends of one’s art, a few at a time and very gradually, but a certain longevity seems to assure that.

I was surprised but once in this respect and that was at the time I concluded my last free lecture at the University of Georgia in the spring of 1950. I refer to it as a “free” lecture because it was open to the public and not a part of any curriculum duties. As I turned my lecture notes face down on the lectern, Lamar Dodd, the head of the Art Department at Georgia, got up and informed the listeners that this was the visiting professor’s last lecture, that his duties were now concluded, and he called for a show of appreciation on the part of the audience. The thunderous applause stunned me and tears sprang to my eyes. That was the once in a lifetime that I had such an experience. Since then there have always been two of me present on similar occasions as there were at the cocktail party in Brooklyn the other day—an old and strange man taking a bow and a younger man beside him who could not quite understand where youth and the full life he still felt had gone and disappeared. (VI, 2148-2150)

Holty did not make another entry in his journal until July 14th of that summer. He remarked on the critical coverage of the Poindexter exhibition that, “while laudatory, was even briefer than in the preceding years and while some small paintings were sold, none of those on view were.” Nevertheless, he was pleased to note that about sixty viewers a day had attended, and that they “were the kind of people I like to have see my work.” (VI, 2152a) The artist was now turning his attention to the exhibition to be held in September at the Graduate Center of the City University at 42nd Street. Dr. Milton Brown, former chairman of the Art Department at Brooklyn College and now of the Graduate Center, had conceived the idea for the exhibition, for which one of his graduate students in art history, Pat Kaplan, researched Holty’s career, accumulated the works, and wrote the catalogue.

The artist did not comment on the catalogue, because his last entry in the journal was on the next day. He had already admired “the energy of [Mrs. Kaplan’s] research activity and her intelligent grasp of a subject as new and strange to her as it must be” (VI, 2157). However, following a comment on the plethora of data available on artists’ private lives and careers through the Archives of American Art, he went on to express his suspicions of those who would seek such information:

One wonders whether this passion for getting at the facts is a true devotion to an historical task or whether it isn’t a sort of parlor detective game, the lure of which is the pleasure of prying into the private lives of others. After all, research leads to the bookkeeping part of history but it isn’t the art of history itself. That part, the main part of history lies in the rearranging of the simple facts and arriving at a plausible and convincing interpretation of the material. (VI, 2158)

Holty continued to reveal himself in letters to friends and in his final recorded letter, to Dario Covi (whom he had known as professor of art history at the University of Louisville), he discussed the Graduate Center exhibition:

The exhibition depressed me very much, something Milton Brown fails to understand very well and though I would prefer to show only the work of the recent years this would have done away with the art-history character of the exhibit.

What depressed me had nothing to do with the pictures that people saw. I saw something they· couldn’t see—a life now largely spent (well spent or ill spent is not the issue), all the behind the scenes existence only I knew of, youth, vast flaws and ambitions and tragedies and a rather hard life (I usually do not mention this) and a more realistic foreknowledge of the future. I realize that my work can do with improvement for which I hope, but I know that I can not become something more or other than I am.

All of this adds up to what I have believed for a long time, namely that retrospective or comprehensive exhibitions should be posthumous. I know that today a host of artists have retrospectives every ten years but that sort of thing is commercially inspired and rather meaningless anyway excepting that the display of the work is given a false consecration. . . .

Painting itself has become relatively easy for me. Why not in Heaven’s name. I have come to accept my limitations and more or less clarified the vision and while no canvas reflects what I consciously intend or intended the image of light and controlled movement is somehow realized. It is a curious experience to begin and finish at the same time, but that is what it amounts to.

After a spell of water coloring, I do have difficulties with oil paint because I try whether I want to or not, to imitate them. After a while, however, I give up on this futile task and then the oils come out on their own reflecting nothing of the watercolors but the experience of having done them. (DC, 3\8\73)

It was within his character that the artist was still speaking actively of painting at this late date; he died only a few hours after being stricken with a heart attack on March 22, 1973. At one time, Holty had written of his art as a quest (as a search for the Grail), which until the end, he seemed to follow:

Briefly, I see it this way. An artist is one who loves the world of pictures, but in all that splendored world he finds one “picture” missing, one he feels he must see along with all the rest. It need not be better or even a rival to the many things he loves. It is simply not there and this is the one he must spend his life creating. No matter how long he lives. The chances are he will never complete his statement. What he seeks is not a notion or an idea but an image. How can he stop, unless he loses it? (I, 62)

Previous section

Next section