Chapter 7: Early Work Through World War II

Carl Holty dropped out of AAA and other similar activities in New York City for very personal reasons. He only alludes to them in his writings, but sometimes does so hyperbolically, as in the following passage:

Wisconsin, where I grew up or at least the Wisconsin of my childhood—has evaporated into an unreal state to me. My family gone, myself cruelly and unjustly robbed and cheated of my patrimony, and I myself so forgotten there that when I visited there last summer as Artist-in­ Residence at the University all those strangers that now inhabit the place knew that I had grown up there only because the stories in the newspapers informed them of the fact. It was not even a painful revisiting. It, the whole event, even the pleasant moments and there were many, was unreal and much like a dream of no particular interest, the kind one doesn’t even try to decipher on awakening. (I, 212a)

Holty does not go into detail on the loss of “patrimony” that he decried in this paragraph, but it had to do with a claim by his uncle on the stipend left by his grandfather on which he had lived and supported others for more than twenty years. A challenge through the courts was unsuccessful; thus, the artist found himself, for the first time, depending on his own resources for a livelihood.

To maintain his family and studio on a modest basis, Holty was able to supplement his small income from painting by teaching intermittently at the Art Students League and other places in New York City. He was well enough known by the late 1940s to attract appointments in various colleges and universities outside of the city. These were for the most part artist-in-residencies, which he held in 1948-50 at the University of Georgia; 1950-52, at the University of California at Berkeley (summer); 1952-53, at the University of Florida; 1961, at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (summer); and 1962-63, at the University of Louisville. Interspersed among these were Instructorships, in 1950-52, at Washington University, and 1955-59, at Brooklyn College. From 1964-70, he served as Professor of Fine Arts at Brooklyn College; upon his retirement there, in 1970, Holty was named Professor Emeritus.

It was on many of these assignments that the artist reminisced about his past life and recorded his thoughts on his own art and art in general. At times expressing doubts about his art, he was nevertheless proud of his ability as a draftsman and of his ability to “catch” a likeness. The first required unending work, but the second was “God-given,” to his mind. He wrote about drawing as a teacher and a student, as follows:

What is always needed and never exists in a college art department is a continuum in drawing that extends throughout the student’s entire program. One needs a drawing “fool” as a teacher to inspire and enlighten drawing (formulating) by the sheer force of his passion for drawing, and for nothing else, to transform what the average student thinks of as an onerous elementary task into the adventure of his whole art career. Properly understood, drawing to an artist is what Mozart meant as an artist to Rossini, “the ambition of youth, the despair of his manhood years and the consolation of his old age.” I cannot now recall that I have ever been successful in accomplishing this feat with any student I have ever had myself, but I must confess that while I was enthused and fired into drawing action when Hans Hofmann first he had just come upon at the time. opened my eyes to the plastic nature of drawing when I was 25 years old, I did not really understand the majestic scope of drawing until I was in my late forties. There may have been particular personal reasons for this long delay but I regret that it took so long. Before that period of great Enlightenment, through a study of great drawings of many kinds—Renaissance, Medieval and Oriental—drawing was a means to other ends, design, pattern and the color picture and when I was in my early twenties it was a downright disagreeable chore. I remember how embarrassed I was, when standing around before some artists’ meeting, when George Bellows asked me whether I liked to draw. I answered “yes” but it was the lie of one who was ashamed about not liking to draw and I felt very guilty when Bellows, who believed my fib, made me a present of some new kind of heavy soft-leaded pencil he had just come upon at the time.

I was not gifted naturally as most talented drawers are with an eye for proportion. The way to remedy this is of course to copy drawings—not to rely entirely on drawing from nature. The drawing one copies is observation already fixed within the boundaries of a flat rectangle. But copying was considered wrong by my first teachers—all but one, who was too old (or so it was considered) for me to be studying with. The new teacher generation did not copy but its eyes were already conditioned by the photographer and good drawing was in effect photographic drawing, tastily done of course in pencil or in charcoal. This was very difficult for me to accept, physically, and I was bad at it. Only as I developed a concept of drawing did I get anywhere beyond “likeness” drawing, something I could always do for some curious reason and my teachers were (from their point of view, properly) critical of my work. I became a sort of hypochondriac of drawing until I discovered the logical structure of objects in space, then for a time the progress was considerable. (I, 228-229)

Holty had made about 50 large scale drawings of female nudes in his Milwaukee studio in 1924-25, as preparation for “further study in the Big League (Europe)” (fig. 1). Although he later considered them to be “mediocre Beaux Art drawings,” they showed his propensity for adjusting his figures well to the paper’s dimensions and modeling them so that they took their place in virtual space. Holty complained of these drawings, however: “I only wish the drawings were better than they are, but when I made them I knew almost nothing about drawing, only about copying rather ineptly what I was looking at. It is curious, as such things often are, that less than a year later under the brilliant tutelage of Hans Hofmann in Munich, the scales fell from my eyes where the essentials of drawing were concerned and not long after that I had acquired a local reputation (in Munich) as the ‘American who draws so well’ and at that time for good reasons” (VI, 2156).

Holty had both penciled and painted portraits as his first professional work. An oil on canvas portrait that survived was of Wisconsin artist Armin Hansen, who lived with Holty when they were students in New York. They both returned home at about the same time but Hansen stayed in Milwaukee when Holty went to Europe. Hansen had evidently invited Holty to take a 1961 summer residency at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and had shown him some of his old paintings, which brought forth these comments:

Was shown a forgotten portrait I had made of Tudi. It is not a pleasing picture to me but is an excellent likeness. I had really forgotten what she looked like (isn’t that terrifying) but this portrait recalled her to memory vividly. Also saw a portrait study of an old man (I had given it to John Hitz) that is very good for the work of a 20-year-old boy. Armin remembered the model (we were living together at that time in New York) and declared it (on re-seeing) a masterpiece of analytical portraiture. What impressed me was that the colors had neither faded nor cracked in 40 years (probably won’t for another 200 years). As I recall, the paint I used was Talens & Co. (Rembrandt) and the painting was direct — no “over-painting” — there you are. (I, 10)

Holty had always been praised for his portraits and he, too, took pride in them until he began to realize that “the form was not big and the work was superficial, though I didn’t know why.” Disenchantment came suddenly, he said, “(while I was drawing a commissioned portrait head of a child; I managed to ‘finish’ the drawing but refused to continue the ‘career’ of portraitist, at least until I could do better, and I knew that practice alone would, in this case, not make perfect.” (I, 80-81)

He never went back to portraiture, later explaining why when he was in a philosophical frame of mind:

And what of man’s consciousness and the human image? Let us examine what portraiture means to him, the art in which an artist can and must penetrate beneath the very surface of the object even though in the matter of faces, despite types and fashions and unlike manufactured objects, no two look quite alike even from without?

Delacroix says somewhere, rather cryptically, that the greatest of artists are the portrait painters. He does not explain that statement. He might have meant that greatness was necessary to create and invent within the confines of such a limitation as “likeness.” But most of the great portraits we admire are of people we have never seen so that there is no possibility of comparing the painting with the subject as a teacher of portrait painting does when he shifts his gaze from the pupil’s effort to the model before them, examining and judging the accuracy of the student’s “counterfeit.” Perhaps he meant that portraiture is great because the artist, when successful, convinces us of his vision and its rightness to such a degree that we do not even question him (he is usually dead himself) about the model for his work.

But the average modern man is quite content with photography’s incomplete record of a face or figure, and professional portraiture is largely based on photographic vision. The professional portrait painter himself frequently consults a photograph of his subject and compares his work, not only with the subject but with the photograph of it as well.

Let me not forget to say here that no photograph can possibly give us a portrait such as Rembrandt could or a contemporary like Picasso can. But no one seems to care much about that deeper more accurate vision and a superficial record of the subject in question will suffice.

What I believe I am proving here is that man is not nearly so interested in his image in any profound way as those critics who persistently cry for a renewed interest in the human figure on the part of artists would have us believe he is. I don’t even care to imply that such a critic is blind to the fact that the great portraits and figure painting of the past are a far cry—say, from those giant photographic monstrosities one sees in the Grand Central Station in New York City.

Yes, it became rather clear to me, and very suddenly so, that the representation of visual objects is of the past, a past that has become as illusory and illusionistic, no matter how pleasant the sensations as in the Venusburg in Thannhauser. While this realization did not, at the moment, provide me with a sense of elation (my general mood would not permit this) it did give me a feeling of at least intellectual freedom. . . . (III, 7)

For the next several years, Holty suffered from the indecision that sometimes accompanies a change in style but, as he said: “I never could force myself to do (successfully) what I was not inspired to do, nor could I prolong a direction in the work, once I had lost my zest for it.” He explained further:

The path of my drawing and painting never followed a straight line. For years the indicated paths would come to a dead end every few weeks; later, every few months, I was torn between goals as extreme from each other as the wide swing of a pendulum. Everything seemed to move along well enough, and then I would awaken in the night and the fear of being on the wrong road would well up within me until I could hardly bear the sensation. Days succeeded days when I tortured myself trying to right the ship before my indecision and weakness were effaced. Like all those of Germanic extraction, it was the form problem, not the abstraction, that bedeviled me most and my clarification process was long and tortuous.

I believe the reason for the over-long journey may have been due to the too-rapid progress I made in my late twenties. I understood a certain side of modern painting of the abstract direction immediately, once my attention had been called to it, but there remained great gaps in my cultivation and in my knowledge. This obliged me to take many steps over again, which is precisely what I did do, but for over 15 years in a rather rudderless way, I tacked this way and that, trying to “pick up” missing elements essential to any ultimately fruitful development. In short, I was ahead of and behind myself at one and the same time. Thus it was almost impossible to trace properly the patterns of my errors until I had ultimately filled out the voids and acquired a detachment from the practical side of the work itself. In theory, I did know about what one had· to master but the procedure to acquire such mastery was not clear to me until I began to study thoroughly and finally the works of the great masters. (I had done so in too perfunctory a manner for some time). (I, 81-82)

Once, finding himself in disagreement with John Canaday (as he often did with current critics), who had written that “an artist’s effect on his time ceases with his death and that nothing remains but his work in a purely physical sense, an isolated thing of beauty or strength, an item in a catalogue, with no more influence upon us than a precious stone well set,” Holty countered:

As long as the art work gives us pleasure and moves us, it will exert an influence on artists and their work as well as on the ordinary art lover. Matisse, who found it impossible to continue the tradition of impressionism into which he had been born and who associated personally with some of its greats, such as Monet, Renoir and Pissaro, said that it was a young artist’s privilege to go back into the storehouse of art to find sustenance and inspiration to whatever past epoch could provide him with such, He himself went as far as the vase drawings of the Greeks and the color combinations of the Persians and drew from those two sources the knowledge that provided him with the means of his own art. So one cannot say that the influence of the artists of those two cultures ended with their passing into history. We do not, cannot, do justice to all the great artists of the past at one and the same time because, our greater knowledge in art history to the contrary notwithstanding, we are constrained to appreciate only with the eyes of our time. Whenever we see some great master of the past with heightened interest, it is because in some way he seems to relate to our contemporary artistic concerns. I need only mention such an artist as Greco who came alive once more shortly after the turn of this century as a sort of godfather to the expressionists, or Rembrandt who was appreciated by Delacroix but not by his contemporaries and who was seen as one of themselves later on by the impressionists and again appreciated in our time for his structural mastery and not for his mysterious nocturnal qualities as he was by his mystic devotees at the end of the 19th century. Ironically enough, most of that nocturnal mystery has turned out to have been caused by persons who buried his paintings under layers of varnish the century after his death, and now that the “nightwatch” has been cleaned we see that it wasn’t a “nightwatch” after all. (III, 37-38)

Holty also looked searchingly at the modern masters and wrote much about them. These two paragraphs are examples:

I know from my own experience and of that of friends and contemporaries that artists often enough lavish love and care on unimportant aspects of their work and too often tarry over bad pictures, perhaps just because they are bad. These are the children of pain (die Schmerzenskinder) and one is reluctant to let go in time even though one does so eventually. Aside from bad and good work, artists are often concerned with parts of the work that are particularly recalcitrant to the will. Often enough that part of a picture that means so much to its creator bothers him and pains him, goes unnoticed by even the most discerning critics. I once discussed this point with Robert Delaunay and he agreed with me that what is so painful in one’s own efforts is not necessarily evident to others. His words were, “On ne le voit pas chez ses autres” — only in one’s own work. To anyone who has seen the reproductions of the eight stages of Picasso’s “Guernica” it may have occurred to note how much trouble Picasso had with the figure of the mother holding the corpse of her child over her arm, like a hand towel (directly under the figure of the bull at the left side of the painting). He made the most daring changes in all parts of the picture with apparent ease but that group never did come off as well as the rest of the painting. He had a particular problem there somewhat different from all the other problems in the picture for here he was concerned to show how the human being was degraded to an almost paper-like status by the heedless impersonal brutality of modern war. This of course is symbolism—pure but far from simple. Picasso always refused to explain his symbolism in the “Guernica” picture but I am sure he was very concerned with it and used similar flat figures in later canvases to emphasize the sad and reduced state of modern man.

Cezanne’s concerns had nothing to do with symbolism but much to do with the “sign” of the image. To realize his “little sensation” before nature he worked more and more with modulations or color-equivalents of natural color or color seen in nature (outside the mind) and paid less attention to cubes, cones, and cylinders, replacing these by the contrast of straight and curved planes. Nevertheless the ever more evident whites of the canvas not yet painted must have caused him to revise at least to a considerable extent his color theories because the increasing amount of white “keyed” the colors in a different way than could be or would be so long as he relied solely on complementary colors. No longer are his “32 colors” (“Je peints avec trente deux couleurs”) necessary. One of his last canvases is in blues, blue greens, and ochres or naples yellow—no more colors than that and one has the sensation of feeling only yellow and blue. The color is completely abstract, decoratively as well as plastically, but these last paintings I am referring to perhaps because they are unfinished are abstract, almost non-representational in the form as well. . . .

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. This simplicity is usually followed by adventures into the opulent and expansion follows contraction. Conversely, whenever the means by which great works have been produced have become seemingly unaccountable (as in these last unfinished but nevertheless complete paintings by Cezanne) a new generation will tend to contract the mysterious flow of the work through analysis and conscious reflection upon the possible means employed. I think that to a great extent this is what Cubism was about for Cubism sought the logic in these late Cezannes and tried to reconcile it with Cezanne’s own but earlier theories, beginning, one could say, with these and ending up with a simplified resume of the latest works. I think the chronological development of Cubism will bear me out as it went from the three dimensional early works to the planary idiom of its later stages. Analysis always demands a sacrifice by its very nature and what was sacrificed then (by the Cubists) was above all color, not only in the sense of coloration but in its structural sense as well. (III, 42-43)

The Cubists had sacrificed Cezanne’s structural color, but their innovations were built on his formal structure. Holty had always claimed the formal aspect of art to be his own weakness. He found the cure in studying the Cubists’ paintings, as he explained in a self-profile that was published in Leonardo:

I imagine that my original bent was in the direction of the harmonious, the lyrical and the accomplished in painting. I moved along quite unashamedly with the taste of my time rather than with its more profound spirit (Zeitgeist). One forgets too often, though one is constantly made aware of the fact, that the purest of modern expression in art has its roots somewhere in that welter of bad taste, megalomania, pseudo-drama tic elegance of Art Nouveau and the Secession periods at the turn of the century. It was a time in which artists were at their best in sketches, fragments, and unresolved projects. The world of artists was torn between a love of and fidelity to the pictorial and a deep hunger for structural substance.

In my twenty-eighth year, or thereabouts, I turned to the pursuit and admiration of the structural. The very simplest language of early cubism was most difficult for me, and I chose Juan Gris, the most pedantic of the cubists, as the man to study. He was the only master I seemed to be able to understand, perhaps because at some point my pedantic side responded to his unvarnished simplicity and clarity.

The next twenty years were spent in the study of the structural in all its aspects. It was not, as many thought, a matter of my particular personality. (For many years I was known as a structuralist of “limited aims and accomplishments”.)¹

Juan Gris’ influence could easily be seen in some of the drawings done with ink and graphite in the 1930s (fig. 2). A similar planar treatment was seen in an oil painting, “Billiard Player” of 1932 (fig. 3).

Inherently structural, the shapes held to the picture plane and re-echoed its edges, or other diagonal variations within the images. The only curves are those defining figures, and they were held to a minimum. While pared to their geometric equivalents, the shapes were as descriptive as need be. Otherwise, they functioned to add diagonals or textured surfaces. Like many other artists who were his contemporaries (such as Arshile Gorky), Holty came under the influence of Miro. The Spanish artist was known in this country only through his works that were shown in New York galleries in the 1930s, but he was later to visit here and do one of his large murals in Holty’s studio.² Miro’s inspiration on Holty can be seen in the amoeboid forms of Holty’s “Biomorphic Abstraction,” ca. 1936, whose overall surface of anthropomorphic forms and creatures against a black ground suggests an evening escapade.

Equally abstract is the ink drawing “Abstraction” of 1936 (fig. 4) which bears the hint of a still life with its ovoid fruit motifs. “Abstract Figures,” of 1937 (fig. 5), is another example of Miro inspired forms similar to those Gorky was making at about the same time.

Holty rationalized their contemporaries’ eclecticism in the following section of his Leonardo statement:

Certainly much of the enthusiasm engendered by the early moderns of the twentieth century was due to “novelty”, the invention of strange aspects in painting and to eccentricities that passed for originality. This was what intrigued the general public interested in the “modern” movement. Only the artists were interested in the more profound aspects of the work and its relationship to the great traditions that give art its timeless character. Those at work were inspired by the insights into the universal that the modern efforts made possible and not by the fashionable earmarks of the new. We borrowed from each other with no thought in mind other than the successful pursuit of what we thought beautiful, significant and worthwhile.³

Even though Holty was concentrating on what he considered a most important aspect of modern art, his solution was “only half of the truth,” because, he said: “Even though I had abjured the pictorial, I still held to the conceptual approach in creation.”⁴ To develop a “conceptual” abstract painting, Holty had started with one or more drawings that he had made from innumerable sources. Examples were the drawings of jousting knights on horseback from which he would simplify, flatten and reorganize the shapes, transforming them into brilliantly-colored, complex artworks (fig. 6). Over the next decade the theme of horse and rider would take on many forms and become a favorite subject. One inspiration was the monumental sculpture by Anna Hyatt Huntington of the Cid (fig. 7), which Holty wrote about:

The statue of the Cid in the gardens of the Hispanic Museum fascinated me as a series of volumes moving threateningly overhead. The statue itself is bad, but the decorative silhouette head-on became a persistent challenge. The drawings for the painting are relatively representative, but I wanted to break up the sculptural forms and use the lines only to equilibrate the surface. The feeling of weight is given through concentrated richer colors opposed to large surfaces of white and light yellow.⁵

The images in these pieces were further removed from the subject but more buoyant in organization than in his earlier cubist efforts (fig. 8).

Curving shapes floated over and under the vertical and horizontal structural elements. Even though the grid formats were only partial, they strongly suggested the influence of Piet Mondrian, with whom Holty was closely associated at this time in New York City. Writing later, Holty made the connection himself, as in this passage:

Our relationship was particular and peculiar. I [had] learned most of what I knew about Cubism and planary control from Juan Gris, an artist Mondrian considered too cold and intellectual. Mondrian’s work, for those who watched him and knew him well, was not difficult to understand because he brought it to us in so complete and direct a form that there was not much one could actually learn.

In my Cubist work, I was more in sympathy with Mondrian’s preservation of the surface than I was with Picasso, Braque or Gris. I imagine that my work with lines on a white field was due to his influence. I had never worked that way before, but I did not exchange the old diagonal Cubist structure for his vertical and horizontal concept. As he said, he did not believe in those who worked in sympathy with his ideas and there were imitators but no real followers because the concept excluded such.⁶

Although close to the primaries, the colors of the colored planes in these paintings were more prominent than Mondrian’s. The older man saw the painting named “In Flight” when Holty was working on it in his studio at the Master Institute in New York City and openly admired the color. This was at the same time that Mondrian was adding unbounded planes of primary colors to his “New York” paintings in an attempt to make them more resonant to the sights and sounds of his newly adopted city. As one of a small group of artists who befriended Mondrian during his years in America, from October 1940 when the older man arrived from London to escape its bombing by the Germans until his death in February 1944, Holty was strongly influenced by Mondrian, both personally and professionally. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Holty wrote two articles of reminiscence about his contacts with Mondrian in New York, one for Arts magazine and one for its annual edition, Arts Yearbook 4. In the first, Holty told about meeting the artist through the photographer Brassai, in Paris, 1931. Then, he told of events in New York, such as when he accompanied Mondrian to the Federal Building to apply for citizenship papers. There was some resistance when the elder artist asked to leave out the middle name of Cornelius and spell the only other surname Piet, to which the woman taking the application replied, “Piet ain’t no name!”⁷

Holty often visited Mondrian in his studio, where he observed the older man at work and made the following observation on his working methods, especially on his last painting, “Victory Boogie­Woogie,” which Mondrian left unfinished when he died:

He worked very rapidly, eternally moving one color after another, always considering the control of the whole surface. It was a pleasure to watch the joy he evidenced while working—on the days when he wasn’t limping. On his off days, it was almost painful to watch him walk back and forth. He had an arthritic or rheumatic complaint that bothered him more or less, depending on the humidity. To control his condition, he cooked his own meals (without salt) six days a week. On the seventh day he would eat in a restaurant and enjoy the meal. Or he would dine out with close friends.

In the paragraphs below, Holty told of the last time he saw Mondrian (after a dinner party at Charmion von Wiegand’s apartment) and of the impact on himself of this artist:

It was well into the morning hours when Mondrian and I took a taxi to his apartment. When we got to Mondrian’s he asked me whether I would come up to see the “picture” he was working on, so we went up to look at it. When he turned on the light, I saw that the picture had advanced a good deal since my last visit. Though it was about four o’clock in the morning, Mondrian looked as though he wanted to get to work right away. Having been separated from it for a few hours, he saw “new things.” That was the last time I saw Piet Mondrian. . . . Mondrian really felt at home in America. It was a dream of his and he found here what he wanted, a modern world to his liking. He had enjoyed a proper fame in the last years of his life. And now, properly, he was no less than celebrated. As to our relationship, as artists and personally, I can only say that I hold him in affectionate and reverent memory.

Shortly after the elder artist died, Holty wrote several passages in his memoirs indicating that he had learned as much about life as about art from the man he sometimes called “the master.” An example is the following:

Poor Piet. He really, from the bottom of his heart, wanted to fight all the things that oppress artists. He wanted to free them from the weight of their personality, free them from the suffering of their struggle with nature, free them for the superb game one plays only with the Gods—the rhythmic mastery of space. . . . Of all the people in the world to give me freedom—Piet Mondrian! You never do know where the blessings will come from.

Previous section

Next section

1. Carl Robert Holty, “The Mechanics of Creativity of a Painter: A Memoir,” Leonardo 1, 247–48.
2. In the summer of 1947, Miro worked on a large mural that had been commissioned for the bar of a luxury hotel in Cincinnati (it now belongs to the museum of that city) in the studio that Holty had taken in a loft with a number of other artists in Harlem. Holty loaned Miro his own studio space, while he moved into an adjoining one that was vacant for the summer. He helped Miro prepare the 9 ft. x 32 ft. long canvas for the mural and helped him succinctly the process of impression and expression in the work of an artist: “I know that Miro did not regard this mural painting as one of his best. Without denigrating the painting, he did say that he had never before encountered such problems in size and proportion and the technical problems did keep him on the cooler side of his inspirational approach, and certainly his subsequent mural-sized canvases (especially the one in the Museum of Modern Art) surpass it by far, but Miro is a realist and a practical methodical man who wastes no time on bemoaning what this or that canvas might have been. Once he realized that he had gone as far here as he could go, he set about finishing it as rapidly as possible. Finishing his painting was a matter of adding the small linear accents, stars, asterisks or dots, and he did all this in one day and that was the end of the work and also the end of his work in Harlem. Certain smaller canvases he had begun there were finished in his apartment on 59th Street. We went to a few baseball games and one football game and we socialized a bit. He did come up to greet visitors on a few occasions, but to all intents and purposes he withdrew from our scene” (V, 2044–2046). The last two sentences were interchanged, for greater clarity.)
3. Holty, 245–46.
4. Ibid., 248.
5. This paragraph and the following one about “In Flight” were taken from Holty’s Memoirs (VI, 125).
6. Letter to the author, January 1, 1969.
7. “Mondrian in New York: A Memoir,” Arts 31, no. 10 (September 1957): 17–21.