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Jon Schueler: About the Sky
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Over the next several years, his work received considerable exposure. The A. M. Sachs Gallery in New York presented one-man shows in 1983 and 1984. The Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery, New York, provided four more exhibitions between 1986 and 1991. Across the United States there were shows at John Stoller in Minneapolis; Dorry Gates in Kansas City, Missouri; and Dorothy Rosenthal in Chicago, all of whom continued to represent him. Abroad, the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh began showing Schueler's work in 1991. In that same year, his last summer in Scotland, the Highland Regional Council arranged a traveling exhibition of his work, "The Skies of Mallaig," with an especially poignant venue at the Mallaig Village Hall. Schueler, by then ill and frail, visited the Hall daily during the week that his paintings were there, reuniting with old friends in his beloved Mallaig.
Schueler often moved back and forth between small and large formats, in tune with his physical needs, and at times he felt the constriction of his Scottish studio, which, when compared with the New York loft, was somewhat limited. His comments on this issue, although made in reference to works of the seventies, apply to the later ones as well:
My feeling is so physical. Too physical for watercolor. Too physical for the small paintings. I have to work harder, drag the brush and push it over impossible surfaces. Distance. Distant space. Inside the space. My nose right up against the canvas, losing sight of the edges, of the limitations, trying to feel the lack of boundary, even as the boundary forms the limitless space.
For example, in Deep Yellow Blues, 1984; Red and Black Sky Series: IV, 1985; Black, Red and Blues, 1985 (cat. #30); and Cuillin Blues, 1985 (cat. #31), there is a return to greater size and the re-introduction of more vibrant color, more pronounced brushwork In the latter two titles Schueler used the word Blues to refer not only to the color, but to the mood expressed. His motifs and painting styles, like his memories, are never laid to rest, but are part of a continuum with no beginning and no end.
Schueler's prescience regarding the direction in which the art world in New York was heading, and his determination to stay his own course with tenacity and courage, recall the sentiments of Delacroix:
If the painter left nothing of himself, and if we were obliged to judge him, on the testimony of his time, how different reputations would be from those that posterity has established! How many names, obscure today, must have been shining lights in their time, thanks to the caprice of fashion and to the bad taste of contemporaries! By good fortune, however fragile it is, painting...preserves the documents of the case, places them under the eyes of posterity which can thus give back his place to the man of real eminence who has been underesteemed by the foolish public that comes and goes and is always fascinated by tinsel, and by the husks of truth.
Schueler once commented on the reception of his own painting: "I had it constantly said about me by people who were sensitive to me and my work...(that) they couldn't quite work out whether I was fifty years too late or fifty years too soon...." Now, almost a half-century after he began his career, this exhibition provides the opportunity to view his work outside of the context of the New York School and the myriad movements that followed. It is indeed time to respond to his paintings with a fresh eye, a sensibility that reflects yearnings of a different sort. Nature is not dead, nor is the human response to it. Schueler reminds us of that timeless and universal fact.
Jon Schueler died of complications related to Parkinson's disease in New York on August 5, 1992.
"Death is a disappearance in the sky."
Bibliography
Schueler, Jon. The Sound of Sleat: A Painter's Life, ed. Magda Salvesen and Diane Cousineau (New York: Picador, USA, 1999).
Unpublished script of documentary film Jon Schueler: An Artist and His Vision, ( Edinburgh: Films of Scotland, 1971) p. 1. Script in the possession of M. Salvesen.
Magda Salvesen, Letter to Diane Moran, May, 1999.
William C. Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press) p. 1.
The Tate Gallery, The Turner Collection in the Clore Gallery (London, 1987: Tate Gallery Productions) p. 84.
Hamilton, James W., M. D "To See the Thing Itself: The Influence of Early Object Loss on the Life and Art of Edward Weston," Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 23(4), 1995, pp. 671-691. See pp. 675-676.
Rouve, Pierre. Turner: Etude de Structures, trans. from English D. Oudot, (Paris: Editions SiloŽ, Paris, 1980), pp. 186-187.
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, trans. Walter Pach, (New York: Covici, Friede, 1937) p. 137.
Other Publications on Jon Schueler
Life magazine, "Old Master's Modern Heirs", Monet: Jon Schueler, Sue Mitchell, Hyde Solomon, Sam Francis, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Dec 2, 1957.
School of New York: Some Younger Artists, edited by B H Friedman, essay by Alastair Reid, Grove Press, 1959.
It is, No 5, Spring 1960, "Letter about the Sky," by Jon Schueler.
A Period of Exploration: San Francisco 1945-1950, by Mary Fuller McChesney, The Oakland Museum, 1973.
The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties, by Irving Sandler, Harper and Row, 1978.
The New Yorker, Feb 25, 1985, "Profiles: Jon Schueler and Magda Salvesen", by Whitney Balliett.
The New York Times, Aug 6, 1992. Obituary by Roberta Smith.
The Scotsman, Aug 14, 1992, by Douglas Hall.
The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, by Susan Landauer, University of California Press, 1996.
Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience, Catalogue by Irving Sandler for the exhibition at the Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, 1996-97
Terra Nova, Volume 1, Number 4, Fall 1996, "The Sound of Sleat," p.98-111.
The New York Times, Friday, March 12, 1999, by Grace Glueck
Films and Videos:
Jon Schueler: An Artist and his Vision, Films of Scotland, 1972.
Jon Schueler Painting, University of Edinburgh, 1981.
Jon Schueler: A Life in Painting, L. & S. Video, Inc.,
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