Chapter 1: Portrait of the Artist as Himself
Carl Holty believed “that an artist has but one obligation, to be an artist.” Despite his middle-class, non-artistic background, he thought as a professional from the very beginning of his training. He was intent on being an artist among artists, in touch with and moved by the masters of the past, but obliged to add his part, as were those who came after him and their followers, too. This was because, he said: “no master can do more than inspire the disciples. The dead can hardly be expected to do the work of the living” (III, 41).1
From the 1930s until his death in 1973, Holty became generally well-known through annual exhibitions in New York galleries such as Duveen, Kootz, Crispo, and Graham, yet they brought him little reward, monetarily or critically. Seldom analytical, reviewers passed over his work casually and simplistically, often turning his virtues as an artist against him. One saw as Holty’s “main artistic problem that although he believed religiously in the cause of abstract painting, and wanted to cultivate and nurture it, in his own work he was a little afraid of jumping on a bandwagon and consequently tended to miss the boat.” The writer’s view that “styles change for Holty in regular sequence but seemingly a bit out of sync, even looking forced,” was ironically “out of sync” with Holty’s nature, to which popularizing and forcing an arbitrary control were both unacceptable to him.2 As he explained: “Since there is hidden from all creative men so much that wells up out of the deep caves of the subconscious it is of course necessary that a creative person be as conscious of his knowledge and powers as is possible, but again only to a point. The man who is aware of his ability to charm is no longer truly a charming person but a mountebank, and the artist who knows exactly how to create a certain atmosphere has fallen into creative arrears as he imitates himself in riding his triumph” (I, 202). “Bandwagoning” was precisely the error of the American artist who was often “given to climbing for its own sake and to using his talents for personal advancement,” Holty wrote. “There are some painters who ‘adjust’ themselves to fashion by compromising their artistic personalities.” (I, 168) He stated earlier in the same place:
An artist in his beginnings is also a personality as yet unformed. As he matures or ages his character as well as his art will be developed. When he is young he will hum the song as he hears the older bees hum it. In America the older bees hum a song of success, enterprise, initiative and opportunism. “Be on your toes,” “latch onto a good thing,” “get in on the ground floor” and “tie your tail to the kite that flies.” This is the song our young have sung to them by those to whom they look for guidance and they follow their guides and in good faith too. It is naivete, not viciousness, that impels them but it is agonizing at times for the teacher to cope with this corruption, for that is what it is, although the young culprits don’t see it as such. (I, 167)
Holty contrasted this state of mind with that of Europe in his student days:
The European as such was no better and no worse than his American counterpart but he was wiser in the ways of the world. He knew that he must concentrate on his artistic pursuit of what he felt was true, allowing for no adulteration of his artistic aims. He knew that no one would take him seriously for a moment if he did not give his very best to become an artist in the noblest sense of the word. Once he was recognized it might or might not be another matter. But as a student and as a young artist he maintained the purity artists of integrity maintain throughout a lifetime. (I, 167-168)
Not believing in a separation of art and life, Holty considered everything pertaining to effort as important to an understanding of the artist’s work, “‘accidents’ of existence [which] are no more to be disregarded than the ‘accidents’ that happen while working at art, or science, for that matter are to be dismissed as negligible.” He cited his mentor Mondrian’s “attitude toward life, his apparent asceticism, attitude toward women (refusing to take second best because first choice was unattainable), [that] give clues to the absolute single-mindedness of his work, as do all other qualities of his character.” (I, 64)
Holty was constantly examining himself, his heritage, his training, even his right to call himself an artist, as when he sketched a word-portrait after seeing himself on video-tape in 1963:
Who was that strange old man with life written all over his face, with graceful gestures and a strange voice? How did he get to know so much, be so superior in repartee and so goddamned poised and elegant? How wonderful to say, “Know thyself.” I always thought I did but I must admit I have never met that man before. He is not the child of my father or my mother. He must be mine own. But I know now why I get tired more easily and why I need more rest and repose and solitude in waking hours. I won’t say the show is over but it is late afternoon and soon early evening. (Even here I am giving time the benefit of doubt.) Obviously there is no time to waste. It’s a real personality all right. Is it a painter though? (I, 11)
He often asked himself this last question, believing that his nature was such that periods of anguish were indelibly intertwined with periods of imperturbability. Such ruminations usually took place during one of his various positions as artist-in-residence (not all in the South, he also served one of these terms at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee). Once, someone at the University of Louisville gave him for nighttime reading a book on his native city of Freiburg, Germany; this brought on the malaise he recorded the following day:
True, I had only been born there and had only visited the city and my birthplace under the Loretto Berg a few times between my 26th and 30th years but my mother had so loved this truly beautiful spot and spoken of it to me so often that I have identified perhaps more than would be normal with a place that I hardly knew. But what a city it is, romantically speaking, and what a proper birthplace for a “genius,” and I dare say I had always thought or hoped it would be just that. What an ideal anchor spot for a mongrel (mischling) like myself to have been born in that medieval city nestling in the green foothills of one of the ancient forests of Europe. In time it has become a fixed point in my endless and unwanted wanderings on the face of the earth. . . . But Freiburg, which has remained in essence what it always was, destroyed and restored, still proclaims the majesty of medieval and Gothic thinking and its particular beauty. Freiburg is something I might not be able to live up to and that is certainly how I felt during those white moments of the night.
The mistakes in the work of the day, and I had seen them, seemed to be irremediable and I had the sinking feeling that I would have to recast all the work I had begun. I became aware of a pressure that I must produce or why would I be in this voluntary exile to begin with? My mind raced on to other unpleasant thoughts of health, happiness, and of those I loved and before long I was staring at life in its most ugly nakedness and I saw my own record (I should not have paged through that Freiburg book before retiring) as one red-inked page in the world’s ledger. Finally I fell into the last sleep and was awake again at about 9 o’clock. Breakfast was tasteless and I set about shaving and readying myself for a return to my torture chamber (the studio). The air was still heavy, the sky overcast and in a few minutes I had reached the studio. I looked, and breathed a sigh of relief. Matters were not so bad after all. Wouldn’t I ever learn to recognize those moments of senseless doubt? Couldn’t I by remembering good work I had done in the past overcome and banish these nightmares (unfortunately one can never remember having done any good work while one is on the torture rack). I coated two canvases with white paint, corrected (or effaced) the offensive parts of the painting that had set off the mines under my spirit and made some changes in two other canvases that required alteration of a more elementary kind and all was well again. (I, 212a-212b)
Holty believed strongly in the binary nature of the artist’s experience and in his own predisposition to its saturnine throes. Even a pleasant evening could induce despair as when he wrote after observing the happy family life of a colleague, Jimmy Ernst:
I wondered then as I often do, whether if certain things had been different I could have lived so desirable a life. I doubt it. I have a restless nature, not in the sense of having to move or wander over the earth as I do (that has been imposed on me) but restless in myself, in my work, never able to ride an even keel for any length of time, least of all in my work where I have certainly been devoted faithfully for over a half a century. Experience provides one with more doubts than with confidence and I remain there as in almost all. other matters, the accursed child of the Gemini—not swaying but torn and only rarely able to make the best use of even my real gifts in drawing and painting. (III, 58)
The doubts did not preclude work, but, indeed, made it inevitable, as he wrote to a painter friend: “I don’t believe one goes from peak to peak without passing through the valleys. Some artists solve this problem by just lying fallow or inert. I can’t do that. I just have to work all the time to overcome that obsession of being creatively impotent that haunts us all.”3 Success was not assured by work alone, but came only as a result of arduous effort — and it was fleeting. Controlled effort when the artist was on the peak or sustained effort when he was in the valley required an innate strength that emerged from outside the work, as described in this passage:
I doubt more and more that I shall get at those large canvases now. The rainy weather doesn’t favor work at the moment and everything in me tells me to put off that effort at the moment. I have been working steadily and need a breather. It takes me quite a while to get the “touch” of painting and then, after a bit, I work my way through the good period and then the touch is gone again. Baziotes told me when I mentioned this to him, that he considered that progression to—and through—the touch normal and said that he had the same problem. What a fantastic waltz it is, that dance of character. and talent in an artist and how often the two are at loggerheads. (I, 196)
Character, Holty believed strongly, was “the most important facet in the combination of elements that produce the work of what we call a genius.” (I, 65) It was as essential as talent to the creative process, because character kept the work on an even keel, whereas talent might betray it. He constantly questioned whether he could overcome one with the other — that is, his natural facility with strength of purpose. Over and over in his jottings, Holty asked, in substance, what Leonardo did in the latter pages of his notebooks: “Tell me if anything at all was done.”4 Over and over to Holty the dual answers came, one following the other, “Yes” and “No.” Both the intentions and evidence that informed Holty’s work and were inevitably intertwined in his mind will be told mostly in his own words, as they are presented here.
- Most of the quotations are from Holty’s unpublished manuscripts, made available to me by Mrs. Elizabeth Holty; now that Mrs. Holty has died (February, 1995), they will go eventually to the Archives of American Art. These informal manuscripts are separated according to the periods in which Carl Holty wrote them. Here, quotations from them will be designated by Roman numerals to indicate the larger, periodic divisions, followed by Arabic numbers to indicate the sections within the divisions. Dates which indicate the divisions and sections shall be given in Appendix A.
- Review of Holty exhibition, Artforum, 11, 4, 80.
- Letter of 4/12/63 to Southern painter Howard Thomas. This is one of numerous letters written by Holty to Thomas, who was a professor at the University of Georgia when he proposed Holty as artist-in-residence to the departmental chairman, Lamar Dodd. Holty served his first residency at Georgia, from 1948–1950. The letters began after Holty left Georgia and continued at frequent intervals until Thomas died in 1971. At first, they were addressed to Howard and his wife Mary (this was Thomas’s second wife, the artist Mary Leath, whom he had married in 1945; Thomas’s first wife, whom he had married in 1922, was Martha Esther Farquhar—the mother of his two daughters). Holty’s last letters to the Thomases were addressed to Howard and Anne (this was Anne Wall, also an artist, whom Thomas had married in 1960). Holty’s letters to Thomas may be found in the Howard W. Thomas Papers #4000 in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Quoted by permission of the Southern Historical Collection.
- J. Bronowski, “Leonardo da Vinci,” The Horizon Book of the Renaissance (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1961), 191.