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Schueler: About the Sky Main Page
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Jon Schueler: About the Sky
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Schueler's struggle in 1952 for an image that would carry his own creative statement led to a series of Burst paintings including Transition, 1955 in which flecks of paint seem to burst with great energy through a black background. "The image...was like the moment of conception...the moment of orgasm...it might be universes exploding...and somewhere in there came the idea of destruction and creation being the same thing. ...And so all of a sudden, in a funny way I intuitively knew what I was about. I recognized it."
Schueler shared the view of those painters among the Abstract Expressionists who acknowledged that their work involved a vital connection with the historical traditions of painting. Robert Motherwell, for example, expressed this notion in an often-quoted statement: "Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which anything he paints is both a homage and a critique...." And, as William Seitz, an early critic/historian of the movement, wrote, "A living relationship to tradition is regenerative: the greatness of the past, whether as a pattern or challenge, forms an inevitable part of the raw material from which the present creates the future." At the same time, according to Schueler,
There was in the air a feeling that one should, to find new forms, deny not only nature but other painters, living and dead. I could not stand such restriction. ...I also wanted to have the freedom to show this influence, when the idea of 'influence' was as ugly and forbidden a word as 'nature.' It seemed that if one could deny the words 'nature' and 'influence,' it would mean that these did not exist. I wanted the influence of Still or Turner or Monet or Goya or the cave drawing or Joya's (Schueler's younger daughter) drawing to very much exist. In 1954 or 1955, I painted some small paintings after visiting the Frick Museum in New York, which I called Landscape(s) after Turner. It was my public admission or advertisement of this idea, as well as homage to the excitement I had felt about Turner since seeing a portfolio of reproductions of late oils which Still had brought to class in 1948 or 1949.
Schueler's devotion to nature, expressed forthrightly and frequently, was singular within the New York School. For example, Pollock's statement, "I am nature," disavowed an intention to represent or even to evoke the natural world; indeed he thus asserted his primacy over it. De Kooning, claiming his inspiration as internal remarked with some wit, "...nature then, is just nature. I admit that I am very impressed with it." Rothko, despite or perhaps because of frequent descriptions of his soft-edged forms as "mists," in fact called them "things." Tobey clearly acknowledged nature as his inspiration, but his painting was founded on an Eastern aesthetic and his themes were expressed calligraphically as analogues. Gorky's "nature" was manifested in biomorphic forms stemming from Surrealism, his imagery a personal microcosm of vegetation and animal/insect forms. None of the painters accepted the precedence of nature or was willing to submerge his ego into it. Of the younger generation of Abstract Expressionists, Frankenthaler and Mitchell, for example, often referred to nature, as their titles often indicate, but without the sense of impulsion present in Schueler's work. To make a further distinction between them, Schueler's autobiographic associations with nature were unique.
Meanwhile, Schueler's personal life was changing. By 1952 he and Jane had divorced. Over the next few years, life in New York City and summertime vacations with his daughters on Block Island, Rhode Island, and Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, were busy and social. He had a wide circle of friends, both writers and artists. Sea and Black Sand, 1955 (cat #3); Night, II, 1956 (cat #4); and Northern Landscape, 1957 (cat #5) are paintings from this period. Schueler's point of view changed from that of the Burst paintings, no longer upward into a centrifugal form, but looking downward, with the suggestion of a horizon line. His summer vacations at the seashore reinforced this new emphasis, in fact Northern Landscape was painted at Martha's Vineyard. Oddly, New York City itself provided a new perspective:
I would be walking along a street in New York and I'd find myself obsessed by the clouds framed by the tall buildings. If you take the tall buildings that frame and you take the clouds across them there's a horizon there...and suddenly I was looking down.... It was out of that that I began to think of Mallaig.
Many other paintings of the mid-fifties suggest the opposite perspective, that of looking straight down at the landscape, the angle of view as seen from the air. Virtually all of the paintings, however, are characterized by dense paint applied with the knife with varying degrees of delicacy, finesse, and strength--in flecks, gobbets, and flattened strokes.
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