Consider this: Eugene Leroy had his first
solo show in 1937, and his early-but-mature
drawings, such as Le jeune homme a la
vitre, date from 1927. He is now 87, a few
years younger than de Kooning, and although
he has exhibited well and widely throughout
Europe during the last 30 years, this is
the first time a show solely dedicated to
his drawings has come to America. It's an
excellent and revealing opportunity to
experience the base of Leroy's hand and
thought, to see the underpinning of his
often impacted paintings -- I don't believe
anyone has ever over-painted more heavily
than Leroy and still painted a picture: not
Kossof, Kiefer nor Auerbach -- so to see
these drawings, many in charcoal, closer to
the model, is a unique invitation into the
oeuvre of an artist who began painting in a
French art world that still clung to a
19th-century vision of the avant-garde
before World War II, and who was recently
rediscovered in the `80s when the desire
for any kind of expressionism seemed
insatiable, and who has now given us
paintings near the end of the century that
simultaneously seem radical and old-master-like.
Because of his inconsistent and untimely
"discovery" in the marketplace, Leroy's
work, with its clotted surface, and as
Henning Weidemann carefully observed, its
"geology of color," Leroy is often unfairly
and weakly compared to Gerhard Richter.
This may appear so in reproduction, but
Leroy's paintings are infinitely denser and
contain no element of Pop whatsoever. This
list of disparities among painters is
endless. However, in spite of their
different intentions, they may be inspired
by a similar impulse, but from a different
perspective. Eugene Leroy comments at the
end of his statement for the show, called
"The Absolute Tone":
The great danger, almost as much with
books, is to have seen too much of what is
beautiful and what is not beautiful, and
the big job is not just to paint
beautifully so that it will be beautiful,
not to make a good painting. I think I
didn't want to make a good painting, I
just wanted to paint. These are the latest
statements from Leroy, who doesn't know
better than to keep making statements.
Compared to Gerhard Richter's two separate
comments from interviews in The Daily
Practice of Painting:
(Jasper) Johns was holding on to a culture
of painting that had to do with Cezanne,
and I rejected that. That's why I painted
from photographs, just in order to have
nothing to do with the art of "peinture,"
which makes any kind of contemporary
statement impossible....Early on, at the
Academy, I would have loved to paint like
the artists I admired at the time: Manet,
Cezanne or Velazquez. But I couldn't. And
later on I realized that its a good thing
that I can't, because that's beside the
point. I'm sure that's what he meant by
"bonne peinture." I can't even remember
what it is -- presumably something like
pure painting.
So both Leroy and Richter speak of some
kind of Duchampian distancing from the
culture and discourse of painting. A
distancing, in the opinion of Richter, that
apparently an American artist like Johns,
who was also inspired by Duchamp, just
doesn't get. Meanwhile Leroy totally
glorifies good painting both in his words
and in his paint. Consider the following
excerpt from Leroy's dialogue with the
sculptor Alain Kirili:
EL: I had found a book on Victor Hugo with
a Rembrandt in black and white. From that
moment my life was changed.
AK: In Rembrandt it's a question of light.
EL: No -- of humanity.
Leroy prides himself on his understanding
and the pleasure he derives from the art of
Rembrandt, Hugo Van Der Goes, Mondrian,
etc., but he is not interested in being a
good painter. Georg Baselitz is not
interested in good painting either. Richter
painted paintings after Titian in the `70s,
but even now an idea like humanity barely
lingers at the edges of his paintings of
skulls, and more recently images of his new
wife breast feeding. Other issues in
Richter's work seem more immediate than
humanity. Humanity, however, inhabits the
work of Eugene Leroy, in spite of the
artist or the time. Humanity is the issue
that makes Leroy's work interesting, and it
doesn't come from a photograph of the
model, it comes from drawing from the
model.
Again quoting Leroy, this time regarding
color choice:
The gold leaf is the touchstone. I was
thinking that tempera painted with gouache
by the Russians achieved the same effect,
which is to say an absolute tone, the point
of reference around which things had to be
organized.
Leroy's drawings are monochrome, but his
handling of charcoal follows this same
arrangement. Leroy works from an unposed
figure, determined by light and usually
drawn from the darkened background space
surrounding the model and the page. The
works are heavily drawn and yet they
capture some kind of fleeting light, just
enough to register a finely drawn kneecap
or nipple. The material in the drawings is
lighter by nature, and obviously less
tortured than Leroy's paint, although still
sculpted with that same relentless charge
of his hand. The 30 or so drawings have an
immediacy, they retain their studio feel,
perhaps because they are all unmatted
behind glass. The show seems lively and
less like a museum presentation.
Leroy's work may strike New Yorkers as old
world, and we can conjure up all kinds of
complaints. But more importantly I think
everyone should reconsider the richness of
Leroy's work, its personal presence, a how
that seems like such an outstanding quality
right now. It's difficult to dismiss an old
man whose studio is ten times dirtier that
Francis Bacon's was. Leroy's words provide
an appropriate ending:
So, what most strikes me is the value. I
now realize something, even with Rubens --
and this is something I've lived with
nearly all of my life: that you can paint
with clichés just as you can talk with
them, and that those who claim to be
thinkers can't avoid clichés. Right now, I
would like to learn to do a nude, but I
would learn to do it thanks to the window.
Yes, that is how a nude would be done.
New York Studio School, Jan. 16-Mar. 1,
1997, 8 West 8th Street, New York, N.Y.
10011.
