Press

reviewed by Stephen Westfall

The announcement for this show reads “The Next Revolution,” which strikes me as being a bit hubristic (if only because the work is conventional enough), but the four young gallery artists are promising. Max Coyer’s paintings have hovered between schematic portraiture and abstraction. A flattened cone shape that might be a head stands on its point, expanding to fill the top of the canvas. Coyer has used this format for juxtapositions of textures and velocities and by now the paintings are all buy completely abstract. His work seen earlier this year was striking and the latest paintings have even greater fluidity and assurance.

by Suzanne Volmer

A difficulty of theme shows can be that artists compromise their individual strength in the process of forwarding collective concern; this is true in terms of stretching to make a point as well as in abridging the times. If successful, however, a theme show can enhance an issue under examination by increasing the faceting of perspective. In “Saints,” there arises both the indiscrete interest in religious art carried on by young contemporary artists and the larger relationship which develops from the reemergence of this focus and thus the discussion on the void it attempts to fill.

The obvious point is that organized Christianity has been seminal in establishing our western sense of narrative form, in grandeur and scope, and in using this as a propagandist means to manipulate and shape the masses. The Church, after all, has had success in its enterprise as a purveyor of morality. It is an attractive source in our derivative times because of the power it commands. Apparently, where contemporary life is fast, at least religious art is monumental, a base upon which to target a more personally telling narrative.

Christian art is a visual aid to a structure organized to assuage spiritual and emotional plurality. It is attractive to the post-modernist in the same way that the Renaissance must have been attractive after the Dark Ages. Literally, it is an uplifting environment in which to fight the torment of conditional life. Basically, artists find that its divinity is parallel to their own situation.

They exploit the genre with impropriety driven by an irreverence unique to their pluralism, yet are inspired, falling for the allure of the higher rationale and the mystification of circumstance. In religious art, self-depreciation and integrity merge n a dynaflow of emotional strength, supplying the artist with a sense of perseverance as well as everlasting life. The resolution factor is amazingly surreal. Death does not happen by natural causes; rather it is imposed, and here lies the relationship between popular social feeling and martyrdom itself. There is no question that in the pantheism of current reference, religious works are anything but another resource; however, they are nonetheless a provocative venue in therms of sustaining the ego of our time.

The point is that today’s artists have a keener eye towards sustaining themselves than they do in sustaining an ether above them. The severity of the style speaks more clearly about unjust and unsolvable conflict challenging us as a society than it professes theological conviction.

These artists are looking for continuity and use religious interest to compensate for the doubt characteristic of blending a beginning with an end, meaning that this show is timely in its parallelism since neo-expressionism is the device of preference used to shore up and close out post-modern discrepancy. (Harm Bouckaert, September 7 – October 1)

Pictured: Video Madonna , 1983, Oil on canvas, 84″ x 48″

by Judith K. Collischan Van Wagner

Max Coyer’s new work is involved with a synthesis of spatial and temporal experiences rendered with unique and original manes. Just as his paintings are literally achieved through repeated layers of pigment and forms, so too the aura and meaning of his work consist of multi-faceted aesthetic and cultural factors. Coyer’s subject matter concerns his past and present as a painter searching to express the ambience of our age. To do so, he has plumbed the influences of particular Old Master paintings and his encounters with them. Technically, he has incorporated traditional materials such as oil paint with contemporary devices, namely spray cans. He has dealt not only with art historical sources but with the more broadly influential stimuli of television and his experience as a person accustomed to living with TV. As he puts it, “I have never known a time without television.” The factor, then, that permeate Coyer’s work are his sense of art history, his emphasis upon the influence of television on modern life, and the media and tools appropriate to an expression of his basically conceptual interests. Also pervasive in his work is the omnipresent feeling of a metaphysical or supernatural existence.

In 1982, Coyer executed approximately thirty “cone paintings that attracted critical attention because of their inherent mystical feeling, their unusual but satisfying color range, and their richly painted and textured surfaces. The cone paintings possessed a transcendental quality or a sense of presence beyond the literal imagery of the work. A relatively common form such as the cone was endowed with an extraordinary life via its isolation in the center of the canvas. The monumental size of the cones in relation to the paintings perimeters, their precarious placement on point, and Coyer’s expressionistic application of paint created a suggestion of a parapsychic force. This work was unusual and provocative to viewers; however, the artist, becoming comfortable with this format, began to search for new meanings and mode of expression.

More often than not the titles of the cone pieces referred to art historical masters such as Lucas Cranach, Victor Horta or Andrea Mantegna, artists who had attracted him over the years.

Moving in other directions, Coyer’s transitional piece was Black Madonna, where we find an art historical reference to a painting by an anonymous Sienese master. Coyer remembered his own astonishment in seeing this Early Renaissance work several years prior to his decision to use it as a point of departure for his own work. Black Madonna, then, marks the beginning of his deliberate and direct use of art history as subjects of particular paintings. In this piece, there are still ties with earlier imagery. The predominant configuration consists of two diagonal lines meeting to suggest a cone shape; however, the sense of volume has shifted from positive to void out of which looms a dark, faceless figure brandishing a sword that seems to literally slice the picture plane. In a manner which would almost seem symbolic, this blade seems to cut away an substantial remainder of the cone. Nevertheless, the textural qualities of the cone paintings and their impression of recorded motion are still present here in the form of seemingly rapid scraping s of the paint surface. Other and lesser remnants are the small cones making the figure’s headdress. In addition to the figure which is startling considering Coyer’s previous work and in term of its stark sense of presence, the other new element is a date that is stenciled but seems branded into the upper right corner. One is reminded of Umberto Boccioni’s States of Mind, the Farewells in which the number on the front of the locomotive emerges from swirling forms representing the activity of a train station. In fact, the Futurist and the Coyer paintings are a feeling of movement; however, there is a basic difference between these pictures that illuminates an important aspect of Coyer’s work. In Boccioni’s painting there is relationship of imagery to reality, while Coyer’s number is associated with the more abstract concept of time. Likewise, the movement in the Italian artist’s work is illusionistic and referential while this factor in Coyer’s work exists literally as a part of the painted surface.

In actuality the number in Coyer’ Black Madonna is a date – not that of his painting but of the year in which the Sienese painting attracted his attention. Thus, the artist initiates and explicit personal footnote in this painting to his particular experience with the history of art. the date is not that of Coyer’s piece or that of the Sienese painter; it is in between the two but closer to Coyer’s own period, signifying his incorporation of art history into his own contemporary terms.

His approach to art history does not partake of a linear view of “progress.” Instead it is a quite peculiar or self-referential view of art as it affected him at a particular time and place. Coyer’s incorporation of influences into his work is at once uniquely literal and distinctive as well as symbolic of a viewer’s particularized discovery of a given work. combined with the specific Renaissance subject is Coyer’s heightened art historical reference to the relative importance of certain paintings to certain periods and individuals.

In and extension of his interests in art history as experience and imagery, Coyer continued to explore the earlier Metaphysical content present in his cone paintings via individual work by Giorgio de Chirico that had moved him twenty years earlier. One of these, 1963, seems the most literal rendition of de Chirico’s faceless mannequin figure set in an ambiguous and contradictory stage-like space. A less literal translation of de Chirico appears in 1964-B which includes two figurative forms, one derived form the Greek artist and the other from a recent series of his own photographs of the human body. At the top of the painting is a “quotation” from Cranach in the form of an apple tree portrayed as a quite delicate pattern. The “de Chirico area” at lower right appears as a “painting within a painting.” Incorporated into the picture is a diagram of the fourth dimension signifying Coyer’s own fascination with the linkage of spatio-temporal circumstances In the later Cornell, referring to Coyer’s interest in the assemblagist Joseph Cornell, a smaller de Chirico-like figure intrudes from the bottom of a box-like space in from t of a version of Cornell’s Soap Bubble Set piece. The de Chirico imagery in these three pieces functions as an indicator of the underlying mystical and spiritual tone of Coyer’s work.

A key piece to Coyer’s individual use of art history is Avery Court. The subject matter here is the courtyard of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. It was in this museum that he first encountered work he later employed in his own paintings, the “Wadsworth Atheneum Series.” In the titles of the cones, he acknowledged his sources; afterward he more literally utilized work by de Chirico and Cornell among others as subjects of his paintings. However, Coyer’ real homage is paid as much to this institution and his experiences as to the individual paintings he found there. The museum itself possesses a rich history dating back to 1844 and the philanthropical ambitions of founder Daniel Wadsworth, a later (1917) benefactor, J. Pierpont Morgan, Jr., and a still later director, A. Everett Austin, Jr. It was Morgan who donated Italian Renaissance works to the museum and Austin who purchased Baroque and modernist works, including de Chirico and Cornell, for the permanent collection. The interaction of past with present in the Atheneum itself is perhaps best exemplified by Avery Court, a dramatic international Style interior space set with a sixteenth-century Mannerist sculpture by Pietro Francavilla. In his painting, in spired by direct encounter but based upon a photograph of court, Coyer emphasizes the grayness of the marble structure, the large, airy spatial architectural sweep, and the trapezoidal photographic configurations of ceiling planes. In the center are the busier shapes of the sculpture set on a de Chirico-like plane that effectively balances the thrust of ceiling forms. To the right of the figurative motif, “1966” is emblazoned, indicating the date of the artist’s realization of this impressive space.

For this painting, Coyer abandoned his ability to achieve an attractive painterly quality and taught himself to paint an illusionistic marble texture. Using a gray underpaint, he “floated” the veining on the base color using a piece of cardboard and a stick. In keeping with the artist’s synthesis of time, the result of of this quite casual technique resembles both marbelized stone and the dripped paint skeins found in the work of Jackson Pollock. As in Pollick’s work, the irregular paint surfaces tend to emphasize the flat picture pane and convey a dense sense of atmosphere. Thus, this “marbleizing” simultaneously suggests institutions associated with our classical heritage and more recent, modernist art history. Scraped areas at both sides of the “marble” add another tactile quality and directional motif. Coyer’s use of diagonal lines at once determines surface and suggests depth.

In general, there i a series of opposing forces constituting this piece. A dualistic sense of time, past and present, is represented in several ways: the date of Coyer’s experience with the court, the subject of modernist building and Mannerist sculpture, and the association of technique with tradition and more current aesthetical concerns. In terms of color, there i an over-all monochrome suggestion of picture galleries. the conical shape of the marbleized area seems to compare with the solidarity of a stone pedestal while approximating an area of ephemeral light. Finally, there are a number of spatial contrasts between flat planes and texture s that exist on the canvas surface but also suggest deep space. Resultant back and forward thrusts in space create a sensation of drama and excitement in what would otherwise be a lonely and isolated courtyard. Adding to the complexity and levels of meaning in this piece is the literal layering of materials or paint into and on top of paint and the final addition of spray-painted black lines defining structural feature, particularly floor and ceiling areas and amorphic form of the centralized sculpture. Forceful geometric line move the viewer’s eye swiftly past the centerpiece and express the sensation of a vast, uncluttered space.

Coyer’s introduction to the Atheneum came when he was a youth growing up in Hartford. He remembered his first trip to the museum to see an Egyptian mummy which turned out to be a disappointment. Nevertheless, he made repeated trips to the galleries and recalled the attraction various art works had for him during the Sixties. In many ways, Coyer’s new work and the previous cone painting are about memory or remembering things. As he explains it: “The work deals with the life of the mind. For the most part the emotion is hidden, except for sense of melancholy. there is a feeling of turning away from the present, a kind of withdrawal and a looking back. It presents a sense of active thoughtfulness.” The meditative quality of his pictures attests to this artist’s complex integration of our time and theories with those of history.

In the “Atheneum” series of paintings, one of the early issues Coyer must decide upon is a particular subject form art history that moved him at an earlier point in his life. After Avery Court, he chose to utilize a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens called La Lupa. The painting is an important one among those in the series because it incorporates past effects with new achievements. The most obvious carryover is the marbleized pattern at left that again suggests an institutional and classical atmosphere and acts as an opaque surface texture. Its density contrasts effectively with the less substantial figures of the work and Romulus and Remus at the right of the painting.

The wolf triggered Coyer’s association with the ancient tory of orphaned brothers and a trip he made to Greece in 1969. Linking the figurative and abstract sides of this piece are the date, one of the worf’s paws, a spray-painted black plane, and a very subtle patch of warm gray paint. In contrast to the illusionist of the marble veining, this small gray area of pigment exists purely as rich, juicy paint texture. The red and green areas have been scraped to add tonal variations and to create a contrasting tactile appeal. Over the areas of thin paint, Coyer has”drawn” figures with spray paint utilizing an unusual technique developed from his search for means that are of his own time.

Coyer’s drawing technique, like his imagery and content, was a product of several sources. During the late 1970’s, he did a number of precise drawings of common objects in still-life compositions. These were made to “hone down my drawing skills.” The general feeling of these drawings was cool, precise, and mechanical. With the advent of the cone paintings, Coyer became concerned with texture and an abstract paint quality that had little to do with drawing. Eventually, he came to feel that these paintings were too heavy or leaden and looked for a more spontaneous technique. Also, he had become bored and felt somewhat disillusioned with pencil drawing and brush painting. Toward the end of the cone pieces, Coyer had almost abandoned the customary use of brushes.

In the course of his pursuit of new means, he became aware of the techniques of so-called street artists. “The graffiti artists had a magnificent new tool in spray paint.” the spray can offered Coyer a tool that he couldn’t control as easily as pencil or brushes. After laying in background areas, he quite rapidly and impulsively “draws” in figurative imagery using the spray and flexible piece of cardboard a a kind of stencil-shield. He uses the cardboard to guide paint particles on to the canvas in a manner that result in a combination of line and tone. The drawn figures are basically two-dimesional silhouette, but attain a degree of density via the shadow effects created by the spray. As Coyer uses the spray can, he moves the cardboard, achieving a kind of segmented effect that distorts and relates the form to other, more geometric parts of the work. This is a risky operation that must be done quickly with complete attention and a focused concentration. For Coyer, it presents psychological difficulties because of his own tendency toward greater finish or working of the surface. “The work makes me uncomfortable, and I think that’s a positive sign that I’m heading in the right direction for me.” His technique forces a situation that demands spontaneity and results in a sense of transience and imediatecy. The feeling of unpremeditation is an effective foil to the deliberation and thought processes that precede and form the foundation for the final act of painting.

At the time Coyer developed spray paint as a drawing tool, he was impressed with the effect of television upon our way of looking at things. As he searched for new means, he also came across a new material, moire fabric for drawings that imply a television screen. shortly thereafter, he declared, “There won’t be any more paper drawings for me.” In several recent drawings he has applied spray paint with cardboard to this fabric with stunning results. The feeling of a television screen i present, but more important i the surprisingly effective combination of unusual media. The relationship of moire with video pattern might seem conceptually shallow, but Coyer’s figure studies done in this manner are his most effective drawings to date.

“How would you present modern life?” is a question that Coyer has asked and answered not only in terms of technical means but with regard to his use and manipulation of art history and his fascination with the visual impact of television. In Video Madonna, a pattern of curving lines envelops the saints like some heavenly aureole. Apparently the artist applied these white rings of paint and then scrape them to enhance surface texture and the sensation of three dimensional movement. In addition, the Christ Child and Madonna were wiped horizontally causing them to appear as though through a screen. the vibrations of circular line and shadowy visages convey an effect not unlike that of a video monitor. This sensation allowed Coyer to update an historical subject and to express his ideas about the omniscient influence of television:

“St. Augustine’s definition of God was a presence that was equally felt in many places at the same time – like the five o’clock news. People discredit TV, but it could be the expression of a highly spiritual phenomenon that man has created through technology.”

Coyer’s preoccupation with the importance of television to our visual knowledge continued to be a dominant factor in his work.

His exploration of the iconography of television also emerges in Endless Voyage. In this case, the ubiquitous TV set in the right corner is balanced on the other side by a pawn as Coyer traslates the background floor tile into a giant chessboard, confounding the viewer’s sense e of distant and approximate space. this distorted recognition of space parallels that offered the television viewer. As Coyer states, “Spatial perceptions and ideas of duration have been altered for artists making art now, artists of my generation.” In Cornell, he examines TV as a kind of metaphorical icon or object of devoted admiration. The precious object quality of Cornell’s work is literally related to a television set. Shafts of white light emphasize both the surface of the painting and the illusion of a television screen. Attached to the top of this piece are “antennae” emphasizing the relationship between painting surface, the glass front of a Cornell box, and the screen of a television set. In the piece, Coyer explores several concepts of the term ‘surface’ as it is used aesthetically and as it may be employed to create illusions Coyer feels that in today’s world a previous opposition of art and nature has been transformed into a “visual competition between art and TV”:

“Television has had an effect on us in terms of flattened imagery and a sense of quickness of immediacy TV conveys an effect of distance or coolness. The enemy or the conflict is contained, one step removed. We see art and create it differently because of television. In my work, I want to state the case or remind the viewed that television is behind all this work whether it is literally there or not.”

Also, Coyer points to the equalizing effect of TV, that “McDonald is presented in the same format as Philip Johnson.” In this connection, Coyer considers the video medium and art history as subject matter available on a par with nature or religion.

Cranach – 1961, a work based upon an earlier Feast of Herod by Northern Renaissance master, is a striking piece and one that can be characterized by the cumulative effect of Coyer’s conceptual and physical means. Once again, the painting has been executed in a series of layers, one of the last being the drawing of Salome and Herod. The slightly serrated edges of these silhouettes create an attractive textural appeal and contribute to the general ephemerality of the figures. Indistinct, ghost-like forms resembling those of television afterimage convey a sense of a momentary of fleeting existence. The figure of Herod seems empty and vacuous yet the face, consisting of parallel diagonals, appears struck, literally shattered with horror. The only solid form is the red trapezoid, a shape common to Coyer’s work which both establishes space and contributes a sense of literal physical substance to the picture plane. The blood red color is appropriate to the ghoulish story and readily lends itself as a link between foreground and background space. The date, 1961, stenciled in at upper left, is indicative of Coyer’s early and continuing interest in the work of Cranach.

There is a sobriety or somberness about Coyer’s work that is in keeping with an overall impression of distance or coolness. Although the ultimate meaning is not specifically stated, there is a feeling for the presence of Idea. The paintings are not about art-for-art’s sake although Coyer is a knowledgable and sophisticated artist Instead, he is concerned with an intellectual approach involving the preconception of a given painting before its actual execution. This entails a thought process that moves through space and time. The paintings themselves may be produced within relatively short time span, but the conceptual basis is a broad and involved one that addresses several complex issues of our age, including that of a spatio-temporal concept of our physical world, the effect of a mass-media instrument as a visual stimulant, and the active presence of his own mind. This is work informed by the artist’s cultivated knowledge and understanding of modernist theory, but it is also work that goes beyond purely aesthetical concerns to the more complex and intuitive realms of human intelligence.

pictured: Black Madonna and 1964-B

by Holland Cotter

Detailed in a gallery catalogue, the definition of “synthetic” around which this group show gathered was complex in its historical reach, but the thesis seemed to boil down to one real operative point when actually applied to the work at hand: these paintings all sought to pursue visual dialectic in pointed and extended quotation from high and low art sources.

Both George Deem and Edgar Franceschi bring their art history right up front. In Franceschi’s Artist’s Studio I we have Fragonard literally second-hand as his painting of lovers in a garden has been painstakingly copied to scale and festooned with mock-David Salle globes and Rauschenbergian whatsits – an additive compounding that produces something like a giant Cornell box and seems determined to divert the interpretive eye with a sheer wealth of privately meaningful materiality. Deem creates uncannily faithful versions of Vermeers (even the camera obscura pointillism is schematically simulated) in which specifics of content have been either shifted about or simply excised. Marginal, nearly subliminal visual jotting (a color-key for the painting, for example, is included on its unfinished framing edge) establish an ongoing creative reciprocity between past an present, and render distinctions of send-up and homage inseparable.

Voy Fangor centers his canvases around the idea of television as an impartial transmitter of images profound and trivial. Fangor was at one time an Op painter and clearly the abstract patterning of the color TV screen with its weird haze of electronic purples and greens still holds visual fascination for him; the disheartening possibilities of “synthetic” as value-leveler find a critical voice here.

Max Coyer’s paintings cast, as they always do, a wide referential net. 19th century drawings, ukiyo-e, and classical architecture are embodied in several high/low painting techniques. The result is a rich, multivalent overlapping which both encourages and thwarts direct reading, as if demanding the exegete linger on the puzzle rather than look to a solution. In their rich, hybrid density Coyer’s paintings are the ones that seem most successfully to both participate in the “synthetic” thesis of this absorbing show and at the same time remain independent of it.(Harm Bouckaert, march 29 – April 21)

pictured: Education, 1984 Oil and spray enamel on canvas, 70 x 48

by Judy K. Collischan Van Wagner

JC:Could you discuss your paintings in terms of a developmental sequence?

MC: Let me preface my answer by saying that the first works of art that I felt were important were early pencil drawings, very precise drawings that I did in 1978-79, of specific objects, such as Scotch tape dispensers and a glue container. I did not do any paintings at this time, only drawings, but I k new the next series of works would not be studies of objects but abstract paintings. So I did a series of paintings, most of which no longer exist; they’ve either been painted over or destroyed. Later, it seemed like exercises in composition even though some of them were rather nice paintings. A few of them exist because they’re owned by certain people (Edward Albee owns one, for example). The paintings as a whole did not hold together as a group.

Then, after a dream, the cone image came into my work. In the earlier works, there h ad been triangular or pyramidal forms, but never a cone until this strong and very pleasant dream about flying in a spaceship. All of a sudden, and quite subconsciously, what turned out to be a cycle of thirty paintings came from that single dream of the cone pointing downward wit what seemed to be shoulders at each side of this shape. The whole series looked like abstract portraits in a sense.

JC: These were all titled using the names of Renaissance artists.

MC: That’s right – certain things that I admired, certain artists, certain words. Then near the end of the cone painting series, I started to get tired of them They were getting too easy and too abstract. To me, abstraction started to look decorative, and I couldn’t see any way not to have abstraction be a decorative art. From the end of the cones to the beginning of the Wadsworth series, there was a six-month period when I didn’t work. I didn’t paint at all, and that time was rather rough for me.

JC: Is that when you became interested in photography?

MC: Yes. Photographs came in that interim period when I got used to the way the figure looks. Then it occurred to me that I might be able to act on what writers had observed about my work and what other people had said about it. If there were certain influences hidden underneath the surface of the cone paintings, why shouldn’t I make that my subject matter? The more I thought about it, the more valid a concern it seemed to be, and I felt liberated with this realization. If you love de Chirico and you have an instinct to paint like he did, then you’re totally liberated when you can make a facsimile. I thought back on my childhood as to which work of art had been most powerful to me then. I chose from the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum, because that’s what I had seen as a youth. Which artists made the greatest impression? De Chirico was one and Joseph Cornell has been another. Every time I see one of these artist’ works, I’m thrilled by them. They still have power.

One thing that occurred to me is that as a artist working at the end of the twentieth century, subconsciously or consciously, there is the feeling of art history weighing down upon you. Every brushstroke you make on a canvas, someone else has made before you. Oil paining, easel painting, has been explored for hundreds of years. Art history is behind everything we do today, and the only way I could see to deal with this power was to actually use art history as subject matter. I think the only w an artist can work today is to make synthetic art or art derived from the work of someone else.

JC: What do you men by “synthetic art”?

MC: Essentially, synthetic art follows a period of thesis and antithesis. The thesis was academic art or that established by the French academy. Subsequently, or during the nineteenth century, artist became involved with antithesis or a rebellious sort of disagreement with established rules of painting. The antithetical tendency continued into the twentieth century. I see the School of Paris and the development of Abstract Expressionism as a part of the antithetical grouping. Today, in the Eighties, we have entered a synthetic phase or a time of combining and incorporating various styles and images gleaned from the history of art. This is a receptive era in contrast to a period of resistance to the past or obsession with newness. Synthetic art accepts other art. This is a receptive era in contrast to a period of resistance to the past or obsession with newness. Synthetic art accepts other art, historic or present. It accepts all the aspect o four time, including art history. It is the art of our time.

JC: How has American art, in particular, evolved toward a synthetic state?

MC: Abstract Expressionism was conceived of as a reaction to tradition in art. It was followed by Pop art which accepted the nature of contemporaneous society In my view, one of the breakthroughs of Pop was the realization that artist really have no business parading their agony. It’s hilarious that someone would claim to be constantly depressed. I think it was brilliant to come to the conclusion that that’s not the purview of an artist.

JC: What is the purview of an artist?

MC: To me, it’s more intellectual. It’s a distancing from one’s own emotions. Marcel Duchamp said something to the effect of there’s no solution, because there’s no problem. He was an oddball character, a synthetic artist in the midst of antithesis. The only alternative he could come up with was just to stop making art. I think that’s a crucial point, that there were certain people, personalities, who were of the synthetic sensibility during a time of antithesis Joseph Cornell was a synthetic artist – all those motifs, postcards, other work of art – and basically he stayed totally out of the art world living in Queens with his mother and brother. these people, like Cornell, Duchamp – probably we could come up with other people working earlier in this century who were not antithetical at all in their approach to art. The zeitgeist wasn’t there. They were forerunners of the synthetic zeitgeist that we are experiencing at the present time. The idea of synthetic art explains recent art history, particularly neo-expressionism, which was really part of the synthetic art movement.

JC: Are there other artists working in the synthetic mode?

MC: Yes. The synthetic vision doesn’t necessarily have to be expressed by quoting from art history. I think the beginning of the synthetic vision was with Pop artists and their recognition of the relationship between popular and high culture. Previously, comic books and television were viewed as very low on the scale of cultural achievements, whereas Pollock and de Kooning were rated very high. The two grouping had two separate sets of followers, and the two did not mix. I just read an account by Warhol of his trip to the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal, where high and low were mixed in the United States Pavilion. He realized that the dichotomy of culture was going away – it was healing itself. With the advent of television or a worldwide communication system, there’s no more space between “Us” and “Them.”

JC: Do you feel, then , that television – the media in general – has had an influential effect upon the creating of artists’ imagery.

MC: I think so. The notion of better images and not-so-good images is breaking down. Lichtenstein is crucially important her for his early Pop works that drew attention to areas of graphic art that were considered vulgar.

JC: Comic strips?

MC: Comic strips, golf balls, kitchen appliances – he made all these references to low cultural things. It’s amazing to me that there was such good critical response to his work, that critics could realize how profound those paintings really were.

JC: What will you say to critics who may attack synthetic art or art that utilizes ready-made imagery as lacking in imagination?

MC: I think Lawrence Alloway calls it the student/teacher mentality of do not copy, do not do this, do not do that. That attitude should pass away. That for one artist to quote the work of another artist compromises the originality of the artist who’s doing the quoting is totally personal feeling on the part of the critic. Art history itself is full of quotations. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a member of his society in the same pose as the Apollo Belvedere. That was perfectly acceptable. It was his way of saying that between Greek and English cultures there was a connection – that images are interchangeable, still usable. With synthetic art it’s not so much a continuity of images but a digestion of imagery – a digestion of all that’s gone before us. If an artist today paints a copy of a Picasso painting it’s not derivative. It is as radical an idea for an artist to paint a Picasso copy as it is for Picasso to have done an original painting. The same force is there But Picasso, acting in the antithetical period, did it to overwhelm the thesis or the accepted idea.

JC: You mentioned the relative unimportance of technique to synthetic art, at one point in your development, you decided to give up using a brush and to use a variety of methods in applying paint.

JC: I’ve never had a formal art training, so all my knowledge of paint handling is somehow natural or second nature. It could be a trap when people react only to your handling of paint, which is easy for me. It seems cheap in some ways – that this is what they react to – a beautiful, luscious paint handling. I felt that I have to put an aggressive philosophy behind tat Beautiful paint quality has enormous power to it, and I try to use it, but brushes have become ineffective for me. With a brush, you deal with smaller areas. You get a wider field of activity with a piece of cardboard or a big sponge, and you get much better effects.

JC: How do your individual paintings evolve?

MC: I work with a series of images just as I work with a series of paintings Let’s say the design of a Dutch coffee container appeals to me. That can be used in many different paintings – in the border of Madame de Sade and in a piece called Dutch Coffee. One chooses the image most important to the overall composition. As a synthetic art work evolves, images over images, the firs part is lost in the act of applying the next layer. It’s losing something in a passionate e way. I was talking to a college professor who teaches a studio class He said the only way he could get students really emotionally interested in painting was to assign them to do five paintings, five different subjects all on the same canvas, one right after the other. So their first might em a landscape, then a still life, and after that a portrait. They were constantly losing a painting, and feeling hurt about it seemed to crystallize their emotions I think that is a pretty close expression of the nature of our experience of things that in turn is important to the realization of art work today.

JC: An individual or an image becomes less precious, less sacred.

MC: There’s a lot of critical judgments involved in making synthetic art as to what the artist can allow to be lost and what must not be lost., A considerable amount of the geisha in Dutch coffee is lost, but you can still see her outline. She’s sandwiched underneath. I have to decide whether I’m going to somehow trade a part of her to reveal more of her. It’s a very personal type of choice. The color of the new Picasso series is from my memory, since the only reproduction is a black and white one. It has a few words, “plain” printed on the forehead and “double” across the stomach, It says “plain double.”

JC: What does that mean?

MC: It’s a double of a Picasso, but also a double the size of the original; this is the first in the series so it is less elaborate.

JC: Could “plain” also be a pun referring to the flat “plane”?

MC: Could be.

Pictured: Red Madame de Sade, 1984, oil on canvas, 50 x 48″ Madame de Sade, 1984, oil on canvas, 42 x 36″ Oedipus, 1984, oil on canvas, 60 x 48″ Alien Culture, 1984, oil on canvas, 60 x 48″

by Richard Martin

Jean Cocteau asserted that opium smooths the corrugating folds “which allows us to think we live a long time,” thus flattening time and memory. By a pressing homage, Max Coyer is attempting a similar suppression of time in his “quotations” derived from Cocteau’s Opium illustrations. For the French artist, these drawings were the coda and cure for addiction, acknowledging the figure restructured by torment and by a construction of the tubular opium pipes which became for Cocteau in 1928-30 a reconstitution of Cubism. For their deeply personal significance, the Cocteau studies can be seen as the heritage of the artist’s association with Apollinair and Max Jacob, inhaling the Paris avant-garde in the 1920’s as deeply as the smoke of the pipe.

The wounded, obsessive visions created are hollow-eyed cadavers and pipes which invade and escape the figure like a fibrous disease, perversely ambivalent as phallic tubes and medical conduits. That Coyer has returned to these works by Cocteau in a time when opium is tamed to be a fragrance more often than the raw material of art testifies to his proclivity to art which is historically and visually compelling, but also insinuates a personal history. Coyer’s 1984 studies after Dora Maar are, in some measure, the legend as well as the art’ his Opium series is a stretching of the tight folds of history as well s a fascination with the troughs where memories hide.

If Cocteau is the basis of Coyer’s Opium series, it is with the sense of distance and of metaphor that Coyer requires in his art. Of the distance, coyer acknowledges that Americans see European tradition at a distance from original works of art, generating imaginative reconstruction and the probability of seeing work not as it is, but by a visually false perception His concept of quotation depends on the obscurity of the original text, almost as if the direct quotation were necessarily always an interpretation. Indeed, in the Opium series, Coyer interprets freely from the Cocteau source. Of the metaphor, Coyer also insists on his own synthetic interpretation of the work, seeing Cocteau’s Opium as a larger parable on denying a habit and withdrawing from exiting beliefs. He even sees the metaphorical cure in reference to modernism and argues that “modernism became a habit” and “tenets of modernism like a drug” are being reevaluated in the work. in seeking the largest metaphor about the Cocteau drawings, Coyer also allows for their disassociation, hoping that the naive viewer will comprehend the work without knowing the connection to Cocteau.

If art and literature are both present in Coyer’s Opium series, so too is architecture. In his constancy of interest in the example of de Chirico, Coyer returns once again to a fascination with the surrounding space of the figure in his paintings. In coyer’s Opium # 4, he has taken from Cocteau the young man leaning backward almost in extremis, vulnerable, erotic, and distended. As this line drawing is transfigured by Coyer, the hero/victim is on a three-dimensional rectangle projecting from an uncertain depth into the viewer’s space with an almost 3-D veracity and horror. In accordance with Cocteau, he has determined the figure by line, creating the head with cartoon gestures and defining the white chest by merest symbols of forms marking armpits, nipples, and crotch.

The same premise is reconstituted in Fallingwater in which the figure is seen as before, but mitigating it erogenesis in an all-over gray of the figure. He is, however, placed within a vista of orthogonals leading to a horizon, and the suspension of the figure, slightly less extreme than in Opium # 4, depends on the outlines of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falingwater seen from below. The cantilevered porches of the house cut in to the space of the painting as they do into nature, securing the figure by forces pinning abdomen and legs like a giant architectural Soloflex machine. But the presence of architecture transforms the solitary figure and brings the ambiguity of space to a scale for painting, now no longer the line drawings of a book illustrator.

In like manner, Wright is the inspiration for Johnson’ Wax, an Opium figure in the midst of the swirling columns of the Racine building. The reference to architecture brings the headless and pipe-limbed and -limned figures to different compositions from the Cocteau drawings in their dependence on the black and white contrast on a white page as a field. But to place these figures of torment and abandon into evocative architectural constraint is also to acknowledge that they are earthbound and contextual. Cocteau described, “It is difficult to lie without opium after having known it because it i difficult after knowing opium to take earth seriously.” But Coyer continues to take earth and its edifices seriously and plants them as the context for his shattered figures.

Is a distinction, then, as simple as Cocteau’s experience with opium being rendered subjectively with himself or the isolated figure as the focus of the work, whereas Coyer treats Opium more objectively? After all, even de Quincey reviewed a biography of Coleridge in order to provide an analytical and removed appraisal of opium-eating in Blackwood’s Magazine. In part, this distinction exists in the media chosen as Coyer’s drawings and paintings are never the personal revelation made by Cocteau. Rather, they are a chronicle of a significant personal experience of another person as seen by a biographer (Coyer professes special admiration for Francis Steegmuller’s biography of Cocteau) and visualized within a larger world filled with issue unrelated and anomalous for Cocteau. In this manner, Coyer’s work is quotation, but the quotation is set into a new rhetoric. an artist capable of reinstilling a classical suite of traditions with values for this century, Cocteau is seen anew in Coyer’s vision of him.

There is a story that Cocteau visited Edith Wharton when Bernard Berenson was also a guest at lunch. Cocteau defended Picasso, showing Berenson a collage which Berenson raged against. As the lunch party sided with Cocteau, Berenson left in frustration and disappointment. Cocteau had won the day, perhaps perversely as what he had shown Berenson was a fictive Picasso, one which Cocteau had fabricated the night before in anticipation of confronting Berenson. In such a tale, there is the art which convinces and wins the day, but there is also the plausibility of art’s simulacrum to continue to make the argument of art’s importance. (Harm Bouckaert, October 1 – 26)

Pictured: Fallingwater, 1985, Oil on canvas, 60 x 46″

by Helen A. Harrison

In this 1978 study of American visionary painters, the art historian Abraham A. Davidson described them as “poets of the inner mind,” whose achievement was the manifestation of a realm beyond reality. Tracing this trend from 1800 to 1950, he deplored the lack of the visionary impulse in contemporary art, stating that, in the last few decades, “the painters considered leaders and most influential, those who have attracted the most critical attention, have produced an art that is not only nonvisionary but antivisionary.”

`Recently, however, there has been a reawakening of the visionary sensibility among members of the avant-garde, as subjectivity, expressionism and eccentricity have begun to reassert themselves in painting. While we may quibble with the baldness of Dr. Davidson’s assertion that “in the 1950’s visionary painting came to an end in America,” we cannot deny that the emotional and romantic qualities so strongly felt in art of this type were distinctly out of favor in the era of Op, Minimalism and color field abstraction.

“Painting From the Mind’s Eye,” the current exhibition at the Hillwood Art Gallery of Long Island University’s C.W. Post Center in Brookville, is an effort to identify a resurgent inner-directed art and to establish context for it by juxtaposition with two of recent history’s most celebrated visionary painters, the American Albert Pinkham Ryder and the Frenchman Odilon Redon. while the show succeeds admirably in convincing us that the impulse is alive and well, it is less persuasive in its implication that the selected contemporary artists are spiritually linked to their distinguished predecessors.

The token inclusion of one work each by Ryder and Redon is hardly sufficient to establish their relevance as precursors. In Ryder’s case especially, the chosen example, apparently an early work, gives only the merest hint of the mystery and psychological drama with which he imbued his fantastic scenes of ghostly horsemen and moonlit seas Redon’s “Le Temps” is, by contrast, more ephemeral and luminous, suggesting a dream inhabited by archetypal figures and conveying an aura of relevance despite its figurative theme.

Inspired by nature, or by the myths and legends that provided appropriate subject matter, both artists created imagery that is identifiable in spite of being subjective and symbolic. The contemporary canvases, on the other had, are for the most part nonobjective and intensely private in their imagery, resisting the literary interpretation that was cornerstone of both European Symbolism and the American visionary tradition before Abstract Expressionism.

One wishes that, since the case for historical continuity has been stated, it could have been more firmly established. Arthur Dove, Marsen Hartley, William Baziotes and a few other exemplars are indeed mentioned in the probing catalogue essay by Judith K. Van Wagner, director of the Hillwood Gallery and organizer of the exhibition, but by excluding them and others, such as Morris Graes and Arshile Gorky, from the show itself, she creates a conceptual void between the past, represented by Ryder and Redon, and the present trend toward exploring in her words “regions beyond conscious knowledge and experience.”

Most of the 10 contemporary artists she has singled out for detailed examination a united by their renunciation of objective imagery. Some have developed obsessive motifs, often ambiguous in their associations, often ominous and even bizarre. Max Coyer’s repeated cone shape, looming in the foreground of his lusciously textured canvases, threatens to engulf its surroundings and possibly even the viewer in a rigid vortex, tightly controlled by no less powerful for being held in check.

The toothlike lozenges roughly painted and precariously balanced by Paul Brown crowd against the surface of the works like serried ranks of tombstones Giant shrouded forms dominate the compositions of Nancy Brett; with titles like “Union’ and “Sisters,” they evoke rituals of bonding that seem all the more primal for being acted out by lumpen ciphers.

Bill Jensen’s imagery seems derived from seed pods, or at least allusive to some organic origin. Quite sculptural in the modeling and endowed with vibrance achieved by luminous underpainting exposed by scraping, these pods are among the show’ most monumental presences, despite their small size. n fact, as Mrs. Van Wager points out, many of the works on view are deceptive in scale, possessing a grandeur unrelated to their physical dimensions.

The issue – the question of a works’s psychological and emotional impact that transcends the visual information it presents – is a central one for the visionary artist. There must be something beyond seeing, something compelling and fascination to which the viewer responds, just as the artist is fascinated and compelled by the need to give form to his or her obsessions.

In many of the works, including those of Harriet Korman, Louise Fishman, Jill Baroff and Thomas Nozkowski, there is a palpable animation underlying the energy evident in their execution. surface seem to sell with contained power. Canvases throb and swirl with a living force that ha no tangible counterpart in the imagery itself.

The show’s weakest work, those by Don Nelson and Guy goodwin’s “into the City.” are the most concrete in their relation to objective reality. Mr. Goodwin’s “Fog sound,” so thematically reminiscent of Dove’s 1920 painting, “Fog Horns,” is more successful n part because its subject exists only in a nonvisual dimension, where imagination and invention have free rein.

by Leslie King-Hammond

One might feel caught in a visual time warp when looking at the recent paintings of Max Coyer, in which art-historical images confront current issues. Coyer was attempting to evaluate traditional approaches to subject matter; in these works, the still life was the primary focus of his dissection and reassembly of formal elements and objects from the history of art.

In 1986 Coyer made an altarpiece for St. Peter’s Church in New York, at either end of which he placed still lifes of flowers – a tradition from the Middle Ages, when the painted flowers used as a metaphorical offering to the dead. Thus the artist launched his journey into the historical abyss of a genre, a journey fraught with the potential to fail through boredom or redundancy even while holding out the promise of liberation through the regeneration of ideals.

Undaunted by the odds, Coyer produced a series of canvases that skillfully reveal still-life flowers in a new light. The surfaces are layered, scraped, and scrubbed; the color is dripped and stained, in a style somewhere between those of Francis Bacon and Grace Hartigan. The vases of flowers, in their slightly asymmetrical placement, have an enigmatic air. And flowers do not simply rest in vases. In White Pitcher and Untitled (Two Vases), they dance across the background, creating a geometrically striped, patternlike wallpaper. The colors are bright and clear, with the luminescence of fresco.

There is no doubt that in testing the technical and critical limits of this genre Coyer was beginning to break new ground. Unfortunately, his promising oeuvre became a legacy with his untimely death a few days after the closing of this exhibition. Max Coyer was a largely self-taught painter who in seven short years of professional painting managed to take on historical issues of monumental significance. He will be missed, as will the works he had yet to realize.

by Ken Sofer

For years Coyer painted people, all with the distressing affliction of having featureless, inverted cones for heads. He now depicts a more heterogeneous population. The expressionless humanoids still lurk in the shadows, but the emphasis has shifted.

The unifying thread of this new work is its appropriated origins. Each piece begins with the image of a woman, based on either Picasso’s Dora Maar portraits or the Madame de Sade of Ingres. For Coyer, these artists exemplify salient aspects of a development that posits a historical period of “thesis” (the Neoclassicism of the French Academy), followed by an age of “antithesis” (the reaction against academicism), leading to today’s “synthesis,” a unification of past and present imagery and styles, and of “high” and “low” culture, as ushered in by Pop.

Coyer, a member of the “synthetic” generation, uses his borrowed images in as much different manner from , say, a Warhol, a Rosenquist or a Salle. He makes them serve as modulated grounds, in an odd way like Schnabel’s use of plates – as a surface to work off of, or against. In a Coyer painting, Dora might emerge relatively unscathed, perhaps adorned with parallel diagonal lines, surrounded by radiating bars of bright red, or cropped, shifted and recropped by rectangular frames. More often, though, the original is totally lost, gobbled up in a storm of turgid brushwork, geometric line, checkerboard patterns and other enigmatic figures: a mummy, a bull, a swan, a masked Mongol holy man. By interchanging the geometric and organic, shifting the planes of perspective, alternating transparency and opacity and flipping both positive and negative space, Coyer communicates a jumpy anxiety.

Although not necessary, it does help to see these paintings together. There is a serial quality to Coyer’s work, which is emphasized by the repetition of images and of Coyer’s stenciled, spray-painted signature and by the uniformity of canvas size (generally 60 by 40 inches). The artist’s clever red-graffiti decoration of the gallery played off elements within the works, providing a further unifying note. Like the directory of a formalist soap opera, Coyer compels us to follow the transformations of his characters as they travel in a world of ever-thickening plots.

Pictured: The Nun, 1984, oil on canvas, 60 x 46″

by Ruth Hartness

I freely admit it. I love flowers. Doesn’t everyone? Even the most hardened cynic has to acknowledge the beauty inherent in one of nature’s best giveaways.

But we all know that serious artists don’t paint flowers They’re too, well, pretty. And pretty pictures are readily dismissed as decorative, the dirty word of modern art.

Well, guess what? Max Coyer is a serious, nationally recognized artist, and for the past couple of years, he’s gone out on a limb – literally. Coyer does flowers, but he does them with a twist. In his paintings, he grapples with past movements in art – American Impressionism, 17th Century Dutch and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Ostensibly, flowers are Coyer’s subject matter. In reality, Coyer paints art history.

But this isn’t to say you’ve got to have a master’s degree in art history to appreciate these works. Coyer gives us stunning, sensual images that both the pedantic pedestrian and the Ph.D. can enjoy.

Also, it would be a mistake to assume that the 13 coyer paintings on view at Fay Gold’s gallery are all variations on a theme. Within the body of Coyer’s work, there are remarkable differences in intent, in brushwork, and in psychological impact on the viewer. for instance, i n”Pierced Hearts” the strokes are powerful and angry. The force of the artist’s hand combined with a liberal use of red pigment results in a startling, almost violent oil on canvas.

Right next to “Pierced Hearts” Gold ha hung “Round Black Vase,” a soft, lyrical gouache on paper. Indeed, “Round Black Vase” is so soft it could be considered (gasp) decorative, except for the sense of adventure and raw energy the artist imbues with his swirling patterns merging into horizontal lines at the bottom of the piece. Alright, it may be slightly decorative, but “Round Black Vase” is a live with the artist’s presence.

Gold ha hung two other pieces side by side (or at least at right angles) that allow for interesting contrast. “Station” is easily the most abstract work in the show; that there are flowers in there somewhere is barely recognizable. “Station” practically leaps off the wall with exuberance. A few inches away, “The Passage” is orderly and precise, with definite geometric shapes (a nod to Frank Lloyd Wright) and an Oriental peace pervading the work.

That both “Station” and “The Passage” are works of one artist is a testament to Coyer’s versatility, breadth of knowledge and experience. Don’t miss the recent works of this 34-year old master. And if you can afford it (the works range in price from $1,800 to $8,500), you can actually acquire a pretty picture without feeling apologetic for abandoning serious art. Coyer’s work is beautiful and intellectually stimulating at the same time. We should all be so lucky.

Pictured: Timber, Oil on canvas

The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown City Park will open three new exhibitions on Sunday, March 5, at a public reception from 3 to 5 pm. The exhibits will remain on view throughout the month. Paintings by local artist Joanne Roulette Happ, works by the late, New York artist Max Coyer, and a show of wooden tea caddies will go on view.

Floral Art Artist Max Coyer (1954-1988) ran the gamut of subject matter and styles in his work; pencil drawings of objects of daily life, totally abstract paintings, synthetic art, photography, self-portraits and religious art.

It was from religious art that his series of floral paintings on view in the museum show emerged. While creating an altarpiece about death and transfiguration for St Peter’s Church in New York City, Coyer added floral panels on either side of the central section of the work, in keeping with their history as traditional offerings to the dead and the metaphor for death, as in 17th century Dutch painting.

The flowers or the altarpiece led into Coyer’s paintings based upon still lifes of flowers. Coyer had explored other genres; this is a dangerous subject for a contemporary artist to handle, for it opens him to charges of inconsequentiality and pandering lo popular taste. But Coyer’s floral works are art about art, and the subjects for his paintings are not flowers painted from life.

Instead, the artist drew on models from 17th century Dutch painters to the American Impressionist Frank W. Benson. He took vases and other vessels from those paintings; the flowers usually from photographs of flowers. The works are beautiful, but not in conventional fashion. Coyer, scraped away, overpainted and otherwise altered his first strokes. Many of the works have the floral container set atop a round table, whose panels set on a different angle than the container’s perspective.

In other paintings, the flowers are juxtaposed with Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, particularly “Falling Water,” his masterpiece In Western Pennsylvania. In his last seven years, Coyer created an impressive body of work. Ambitious and prolific, he succeeded in creating works which are both beautiful and intellectual. His images, no matter how sensually presented, are always informed with the weight of art history. He mined the past lavishly, but he was not a mere copyist.

by Karin Lipson

“EMERGING ARTIST” is an overworked phrase, applied to those who are not only little-known at the moment, but are, often enough, likely to stay that way. But the term seems to fit Max Coyer, a 34-year-old painter who’s being given a one-man show at the Hillwood Art Gallery. A largely self-taught artist who only began painting six years ago, Coyer was given this exhibition because the Hillwood Gallery’s director, Judy Collischan Van Wagner, felt his steady development as an artist hadn’t met with enough critical attention.

Ironically, since this exhibition was planned, Coyer has been taken on by the Gruenebaum Gallery in New York, which gave him a solo show last fall. That doesn’t exactly propel him into stardom, but it’s a nice step forward for a still relatively “new” painter.

And just what sort of a painter is he? From the looks of the Hillwood Gallery show -which covers the last five years, virtually his entire career – Coyer is a talented, prolific artist whose love affair with paint and its manifold possibilities is going full tilt. There is in his work a sense of experimentation, of luxuriating in an almost voluptuous freedom to paint, that may reflect his relatively late beginnings.

Working on canvas and wood, Coyer lays one thin, translucent layer of paint over another, so that multiple bands of color come through to the surface, creating a surprisingly rich effect. He paints over images, nearly obliterating them (though letting a hand or a leg poke out here and there), or scrapes off the paint, leaving little ruts of color that travel across faces and figures.

Gold leaf is spread over knobby wood and around protruding nails, the rich gilding contrasting with the rough-hewn surface. Torsos of 19th-Century ladies in their dŽcolletŽ gowns – images taken right out of Ingres – are topped by frightening looking shamanistic masks. The result of Coyer’s strange admixture is sometimes repellent, but just as often compelling in its ambiguity.

MAX COYER: ÊIcon and Iconography – Paintings of the last five years by this young, self-taught artist, through March 18 at the Hillwood Art Gallery, C. W. Post campus, Brookville. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays except Wednesday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Wednesday; 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Closed Saturday.

“The Recovery of Jean Cocteau,” the title of Max Coyer s recent exhibition, alludes to Cocteau’s treatment for opium addiction at a hospital at Saint Cloud in 1929. As part of the treatment program, Cocteau kept a journal and made a series of drawings, several of which may be taken as self- portraits in extremis. “The Recovery of Jean Cocteau” can also be taken in the sense of the current rejuvenation of Cocteau’s artistic reputation.

Coyer’s use of Cocteau’s work in his series of paintings is another step in his recycling of the past. Coyer has spoken of the present age as a synthetic period: he feels that, in the best Hegelian manner, the seeming opposites of academic and modernist art have become a common field from which today’s artists can pick.

Coyer has ranged far and wide in this field; his past work has drawn from the Renaissance and from Surrealism, as well as a variety of architectural styles. Such a program puts Coyer into company with much con- temporary art. At its most facile, such an approach results in a stylish eclecticism- everything by turns, nothing for very long. At its best, this approach can be the painterly equivalent of Hesse’s glassbead game, where elements from an almost infinite variety of sources are assembled in thought-provoking juxtapositions, then disassembled and further reconstituted.

The Death of Vitellius is a typical example of Coyer’s method. The toga-clad figure dominating the painting is taken from one of Cocteau’s opium drawings. In the middle of the figure can be seen the outline of a bound hand, taken from the 19th-century painter Jules-Eugene Lenepveu’s painting of the same title. The architecture at the left is from Tintoretto’s Finding of Saint Mark. Barely visible is the hind leg of a horse from an equestrian portrait by Velasquez.

“Max Coyer’s remarkable new series of paintings, drawings and constructions verify the creative ability of this gifted young artist. The exhibition is entitled “The Recovery of Jean Cocteau” and these works refer, rather cryptically, to the recovery of Jean Cocteau from an addiction to opium in the clinic of St. Cloud in 1929. For Cocteau, this was but one of many drug cures which spanned his lifetime. As part of his rehabilitation, Cocteau made a series of drawings which illustrated the text of a journal he was writing in the hospital.

Coyer takes these drawings as a point of departure, but completely transforms them by adding color and incorporating references to various periods of art history. Beginning with the simple one-dimensional line drawings of Cocteau, Coyer’s gift for innovation amplifies their latent intricacy by adding quotations from the volumetric space of architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Falling Water” house, in particular, is incorporated into the works as part of the cultural geometry.

Art historical references run the gamut from the Art Nouveau structures of Victor Horta to such Old Masters as Angelo Bronzino and Diego Velasquez to early twentieth century artists such as Giorgio de Chirico and Kurt Schwitters. Coyer has fused these diverse sources into an enchanted realm of his own making, although the spirit of Cocteau permeates the entire vision. The dual meaning of the title relates to the recovery of Cocteau from drug addiction as well as the rediscovery of Cocteau’s work by an American artist who is himself on the verge of discovery by a wider public.