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Review LACMA Exhibit On John Altoon Shows His Jazzy, Seductive Touch

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  • Review LACMA Exhibit On John Altoon Shows His Jazzy, Seductive Touch

    REVIEW LACMA EXHIBIT ON JOHN ALTOON SHOWS HIS JAZZY, SEDUCTIVE TOUCH

    Los Angeles Times
    June 11 2014

    Christopher Knight

    or a brief, shining moment in the 1960s, John Altoon was the great
    American painter of the great American sexual revolution.

    Voluptuous color and luxurious interpenetrations of sensuous forms
    conspired to make messy, elegant, often witty abstract pictures. Their
    hedonistic punch is a delicious indulgence.

    Altoon's sudden death in 1969 from a heart attack at the age of 43
    cut short a promising career. Where he would have gone is of course
    impossible to know, but many of his best paintings, made over the
    previous seven years, landed in museum collections up and down
    California. Today they look as fresh and fine as any from the period.

    Many are included among the 18 works on canvas and 50 on paper or
    cardboard assembled by curator Carol S. Eliel for the much-anticipated
    survey newly opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A prolific
    draftsman, Altoon destroyed a considerable number of his paintings,
    so the show is a concise overview.

    Altoon's interest in the cool, seductive rhythms of West Coast jazz
    informed his work.-

    Altoon was born in Los Angeles in 1925 of Armenian-immigrant parents
    (the family name was Altoonian). Thanks to military service during
    World War II and the subsequent GI Bill, he studied commercial
    illustration and painting at three area art schools -- Otis, Art Center
    and Chouinard. At 26 he moved to New York City and, three years later,
    to Europe.

    Suffering a psychological breakdown abroad -- Altoon is believed to
    have wrestled with schizophrenia or manic depression, which landed
    him in the hospital several times -- he returned permanently to Los
    Angeles in 1956. Twice married (his first, to Fay Spain, an actress
    who mostly worked in television, ended in divorce in 1962), he made
    his living teaching and doing commercial work.

    The LACMA show opens with a certainly skillful if uninspired painting
    of a pair of jazz saxophonists made around 1950. The figures are
    rendered in a self-consciously arty style -- call it "mass-market
    modern" -- that is a kind of Cubist faceting squashed flat.

    Like artists as diverse as David Park in the Bay Area and Wallace
    Berman and William Claxton in L.A., however, Altoon's interest in
    the cool, seductive rhythms of West Coast jazz informed his work. He
    designed album covers for Pacific Jazz Records and other companies,
    but the music's reliance on sensual improvisation is what infiltrated
    his paintings.

    The 1956-57 oil "Ode to Thelonious" (as in jazz pianist and composer
    Thelonious Monk) applies Cubist structure to nothing but vaporous,
    colored space. Shifting, angular patches of blue and green shot through
    with bursts of violet and darting red-orange lines open deep vistas --
    then suddenly close them down, snapping attention back to the painted
    surface. Unlike the earlier "Jazz Players," this poetic visual song
    is fully non-figurative.

    Between making these two paintings Altoon fell under the spell of
    Willem de Kooning, titan of the New York School. The older artist's
    stature was exploding at precisely the moment the Angeleno was living
    in New York. De Kooning also dropped the figure for pure abstraction
    not long before Altoon painted his "Ode."

    It's also tempting to tie Altoon's interest to De Kooning's own
    passionate admiration for the work of another troubled young Armenian
    American painter -- De Kooning's friend Arshile Gorky, who committed
    suicide in 1948 at 44.

    Altoon's large "Mother and Child" (1954), painted with great
    technical finesse, is a marvelous dance between color and line. A
    neo-Cubist abstraction, it is aptly likened in the show's catalog to
    De Kooning's celebrated paintings of women from the late 1940s and
    early 1950s. Yet it contains none of the New York painter's fierce
    and violent aggression.

    Instead, Altoon's monumental woman, seated with a child in her lap,
    is a virtual Madonna enthroned. Executed in a lively if serene palette
    of warm browns and pale, cool greens, the painting is closer in tone
    and subject to Gorky's heartfelt figurative paintings of "The Artist
    and His Mother." (Those were seen in the great 2010 Gorky retrospective
    at the Museum of Contemporary Art.) Conflicting childhood memories of
    security and anxiety within a context of feminine nurturing loom large.

    Several years on, as Altoon matured into his mid-30s, those impulses
    would be caressed in lyrical -- and inescapably erotic -- reveries.

    The canvas becomes a field for the colorful interplay of suggestive,
    fragmentary signs for buttocks, breasts, phalluses, vulvas, limbs
    and visceral, sentient animals. Lush, sometimes messy shapes, brush
    strokes, splatters and forms evoke a feral sexuality engaged in a
    struggle with cultivation and, often, whimsy.

    Lush, sometimes messy shapes, brush strokes, splatters and forms
    evoke a feral sexuality engaged in a struggle with cultivation and,
    often, whimsy.-

    The tussle is most explicit in his ink drawings, with their thin,
    quivering, agitated lines often describing body parts and frank
    sexual activity. The precedent of Picasso's eroticism is evident,
    especially in an untitled 1959 graphite and ink-wash drawing of a
    shadowy feminine figure serenaded by a flute-playing satyr or Minotaur.

    Sex is also an obvious tool of mass-media commercial art, flooding
    late-20th century America, with which Altoon was well-versed. Several
    satirical works play with advertising motifs.

    One shows a dapper young couple in a White Owl cigar ad: He smokes,
    she pouts. Rather than focus on a close-up as a conventional ad would,
    Altoon pulls back (like a reverse camera-zoom) to show the fashionable
    pair full-length: Both are stark naked below the waist. The cigar
    scene turns into an ad for post-coital relaxation.

    The '60s sexual revolution was propelled by many things, including
    a postwar generational shift, scientific developments like the birth
    control pill, a growing and newly prosperous middle class and other
    deep transformations in American society. As it unfolded, artists in
    Altoon's orbit -- Kenneth Price, Judy Gerowitz (later Chicago), Craig
    Kauffman and more -- moved sexuality to the forefront of their imagery,
    often in abstract forms. (A 1964 group exhibition at Ferus Gallery,
    where Altoon also showed, was notoriously titled "The Studs.") Few
    addressed the experience in as riveting, seductive and playfully
    generous a manner as Altoon.

    One interesting feature of the LACMA show is the invitation offered
    to five artists to contribute short essays to the catalog. They make
    for interesting reading.

    None is more incisive than Monica Majoli, who writes on "the
    omnipotence of flesh" in both human experience and Altoon's work.

    "Promiscuous abstraction" is the phrase she uses to describe his art
    in the 1960s, and it is hard to think of a better one.

    http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-knight-altoon-review-20140611-column.html#page=1



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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