Altoon: Beyond the Aura - works of John Altoon

With his outsized personality and reckles intensity, John Altoon loom large in the L.A. art exhibition of the '50s and '60 Almost 30 years after his death, a overlook exhibition afforded another look at this provocative artist.

John Altoon was individual of the baddest of the bad lads who shaped the Los Angeles art spectacle of the 1950s and '60 A swarthy, imposing figure, he boasted of riding his motorcycle at make hastes over 100 mph, and of driving a car blindfolded. Diagnosed as schizophrenic in his late 30 Altoon (1925-1969) meet withed depression as well as paranoid episodes during which he sap the foundations ofed much of his work and threatened to demolish that of others. He was "possess by dint of real demons," Larry Bell remembers.[1] Irving Blum partner in the legendary Ferus Gallery, recalls: "If the gallery was closest in spirit to a single individual that person was John Altoon--dearly lov defiant, romantic, highly ambitious--and slightly mad."[2] Altoon's try with mental illness, his big, dark, robust personality and his early death from a heart attack at 43 have, plane more than his art itself, advance to define his legacy.

A novel survey of Altoon's paintings, drawings and prints at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, did little to dispel this aura of romantic tragedy, or to make a more convincing case for Altoon's artistic legacy. Personal reminiscences largely put the tone in the accompanying catalogue, and the exhibition itself--co-curated by the agency of MCA director Hugh Davies and his assistant, Andrea Hales--functioned more as a sympathetic tribute than a critical reassessment. The present to view touched all the bases of Altoon's radically varied output methodically and democratically, on the other hand without the emphasis of judgment

Like his matchs in the Ferus group--Robert Irwin, ed Kienholz, Ed Moses and others--Altoon started painting in an Abstract-Expressionist manner almost as a generational rite of passage. He orchestrated his large gestural paintings upon the dynamic between tension and release. Fay's Christmas Painting (1958) a standout in the display balances a tight matrix of agitated lines in verdant red, orange and blue against a calmer, les articulated field of pale verdant In his "Trip" series of 1959 wavering ribbons of color pulsate across the canvas like a fluttering quilt.

Altoon was more a "consolidator" than an innovator, as Davies writes in the catalogue's foreword, and he had ample in all senses to the New York place of education during four years he wearied in the city (1951-55) painting and working as a commercial illustrator. After a year-long sojourn in Spain and France, Altoon turn backed to his native Los Angeles, where the calligraphic thrust of his work, its internal scaffolding of webs and knots, integrated the influence of Philip Guston as well as that of Hassel Smith, a Bay Area Expressionist who appeared in the inaugural present to view at Ferus in 1957. Altoon's palette could achieve muddy and his schema musty, as several examples in the exhibit attest, but many of the paintings remain new their internal charge intact.

Stalwarts of the L.A. show proceeded to clean up after "messy '50 painting," as Craig Kauffman lay it,[3] paring down to the ephemeral essentials of transparency, light and space. more [i]or[/i] less like Kienholz, pushed even further toward naked emotion and gritty, raw experience. Altoon followed a reductive path, shifting from an allover painted surface to discrete shapes floating within the render free of access space of the white canvas, on the other hand the marks themselves remained relatively raw and rough-hewn. He exhibited consistently over the '60s, generally to profitable reviews, but the history of this fecund period in L.A. art can present Altoon's work no better than a nebulous role

Altoon's "Ocean Park" paintings of the early '60 signal the beginning of his use of semiautomatic imagery, a vocabulary of vaguely figurative, botanical and biological forms that he pursu until his death. In these elusive, oftentimes commanding paintings and in abundant of his subsequent work, Altoon practiced a sort of painterly assemblage, staging discontinuous ingatherings of forms in a rich palette of sunflower, crimson, morning glory and pale muscle and fat Lobes, flaps, tendrils, stems, propels and bulbs hover in indeterminate space, appendages in search of a material substance Some are obliquely sexual, others publicly phallic. The work's cumulative energy--its "unkempt intensity," as single writer put it at the time[4]--derives from the animate quality of the shapes, their unfixed contours and their suggestions of growing and transmutation.

The tendril-and-bulb combination that come agains in Altoon's work evokes the early, overtly erotic imagery of Craig Kauffman, on the other hand Altoon's strongest affinity lies with Arshile Gorky. Altoon's biomorphic shapes, like Gorky's, align themselves within each painting or drawing according to an organic, internal logic, creating a visual common for the eye to ride, as fluid as the stream of consciousness. In a lyrical little gouache of 1961 a ridge of rust, dabbed with thick white fingerprints, shelters several smears the color of pumpkin. blazing star trails of white and orange, a lipstick-red T fragments of webs, pullulates and tendons create a regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement of small continuities and large voids. Vigorous, shimmering passages arise frequently in Altoon's work, on the other hand only rarely, as in this painting, could he sustain that vibrancy from cutting side to edge.