LOUIS FINKELSTEIN PAINTINGSNOVEMBER 26, 2001 - JANUARY 5, 2002
Norman Turner, who will be showing his own work at the New York Studio School in 2003, remembers Louis Finkelstein, who taught him at the Studio School in its first years
Louis Finkelstein Hanover Center I 1996, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches, Estate of Louis Finkelstein
I first met Louis Finkelstein while I was a student at the New York Studio School. Dropping by as a visiting critic, he took a look at a painting I was working on, talked to me a while. This was in 1964, 1965. After thirty-five years, I remember what he said. Soon, as Chairman of the art department at Queens College, he hired me to put together easels for the new graduate program. Bristling with energy and incipient irritation, always in a huge rush, he stopped by the old gym, where the program was to be lodged, and cast an eagle eye on my deliberate progress. After thirty-five years, I remember that glance.
Some time later, Louis' wife, the painter Gretna Campbell, hired me as an odd-job mechanic at their upper West side brownstone. Whether I was there to varnish a table, strip woodwork, ready pictures for a show, hang French doors and roll a coat of white onto son Henry's room or be a student of painting, soaking up what Gretna and Louis advocated, was far from clear. No line was drawn between me as helper and me as young artist. Arriving to scrape and sand, I would be shown a reproduction, offered some observations on how the picture in question was built. Louis was often out at Queens, where his ferocious dedication was already building the art department into what it became, one of the finest, but when he was around the atmosphere was noticeably more keyed up. To Gretna's laconic drawl, he added his massive vocabulary and the wide-ranging vistas it represented. Describing painters as "street philosophers," impromptu players in the theater of ideas, he seemed always on a mental roll, his brain on fire. The febrile atmosphere of that household, resembling a vertical loft, strewn with random furniture, paintings and books of reproductions, where art was all that was much worth talking or thinking about, made a lasting impression on me. I was seeing at first hand what it meant to be immersed in an energetically creative way of life.
Some years later still, I was one of several who made a pilgrimage to Queens to sit in on his seminar, "Comparative Analysis," modeled on the method of Wölfflen. When I phoned him to ask permission, he growled, "I don't do piecework," but relented when I agreed to take on the assignments, just like an undergraduate. It can be said without a trace of exaggeration that his was an amazing performance. Each weekly lecture was four hours long. Louis, having done a hero's labor of preparation - having mastered a staggering amount of material, having construed it according to a penetrating logic, and having picked a battery of slides - would speak seemingly extempore, or only refer occasionally to rough notes. It was nothing like art history as usually presented; it was an excursion into the meaning of form. He unpacked works of art as only a painter could, provided he had a rare eye and the mental resources needed to tease out the implications. I have never heard or seen anything like it before or since. Not only did I acquire a lasting interest in one of the topics he presented to us, linear perspective, I saw in this man and his approach a source of downright wisdom about painting and its utmost importance and a model to emulate, in my own way. He also gave me a terrific reading list.
Louis Finkelstein Hanover Center II 1998, oil on canvas, 38 x 42 inches, Estate of Louis Finkelstein
There's not much else to relate, except in bits and drabs. Conducting a seminar for Studio School students on Merleau Ponty's "Eye and Mind," he began one session by reading a brief paper I'd written for the Comparative Analysis course, greatly surprising me. Attending the opening of an early show of mine, he stayed until he was the last one there, came up to me as I went to shut off the lights, looked me in the eye and said, "I just want you to know that I think your work is knowledgeable, courageous and strong." (Though I don't now think that those pictures especially showed the virtues he named, and have thrown out a number of them, it can easily be imagined how these words sustained me over the years.) At a time when others not unreasonably deplored my actions, his stance was warily neutral, and for that I was grateful. We sometimes disagreed - about Jackson Pollack, for instance, whose work I defended against his outright attack. Though I never thought to be his equal in learning, for he seemed truly to have read everything, and, what's more, to have understood it, he called me once for advice about how to structure the opening argument of an article he was working on. I re-hashed and published in bare paraphrase a statement he had written about his painting, thinking I was doing him a favor, and for this he rightly never quite forgave me - burst out to me, in anger, that I was "a popularizer" - not a term of description many among my handful of readers would think to employ. I ought to have known better. Listening to him lecture many times over the years, I had already decided his discourse could in no way be separated from the inimitable language and syntax used to construct it. I also injured him, thoughtlessly, by referring in what I imagined was a positive way to the eclecticism of his work, only to learn from his mentioning it afterward in an aggrieved voice more than once that this was a sore spot, probably a source of criticism from others. I much regretted having said what I did, but too late.
He gave me a leg up in publishing an article on Cézanne, thought of me when asked to recommend people for jobs. I went with an interest well beyond duty to his shows, admired the terrific landscape paintings he did of New York City and elsewhere. Visiting a summer program I was directing, following me down the stairs to the lower studios on our tour of what the students were up to, I heard him mutter behind me, "same old shit." Coming out to Queens for meetings on the new art building, he would stop by the studios afterward, watch me start an evening class in painting or drawing. He was checking up on me to see if I was doing my job - and this was after I'd been teaching there some eight years and after he had retired! I took him canoeing on Eligo Pond, in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, a first-time experience for him, somewhat spoiled, maybe, by his discovery that from the bow position he couldn't control the boat. Glancing back over his shoulder, he showed a discontented expression when he saw that it was I, a former student, doing the "J" stroke in the stern, who decided where we would go.
Though we were never what you could call close, we talked on the phone, wrote letters back and forth, socialized now and again. I was always glad to see him, even when he was grumpy; always got a charge from his presence. He helped me, demonstrated faith in me, beyond, perhaps, what was justified by the concurrent results, saw within me my potential, gave my work the benefit of his acute attention. And he did not single me out for this benefice. I know for certain that he gave the same to others. It was extraordinarily generous. He was a generous man. I'm forever in his debt.
If everyone carries around in their head a map upon which all the people who figure in their lives are placed, he, though dead, still stands in the middle distance, not near, not far, clearly delineated and looming, a big guy, a signpost and a beacon. At a time when too many artists I run into are intellectual philistines, actively hostile to ideas, he gave to passionate thought and endless learning the weight of a crucial endeavor, the dignity of what is importantly human, the integrity of an ethical stand.
Louis Finkelstein From Tiepolo's "Jugurtha" 1998, oil on canvas, 64 x 52 inches, Estate of Louis Finkelstein
LOUIS FINKELSTEIN PAINTINGS continues at the New York Studio School through Saturday, January 5, 2002, open daily 10-6. Full color catalogue available on request.
Gallery talks: Friday, November 30, 1.15pm: Patricia Mainardi, art historian
Saturday, January 5, 2002, 4.30pm: Henry Finkelstein, painters, followed by closing tea party,
212 673 6466 for details
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