2 Nathan Oliveira: Forgetting the Self

 

Forgetting the Self

The Art of Nathan Oliveira

by John Seed

All text contents copyright 2003

 

Nathan Oliveira, Standing Man with Hands in Belt, 1960

Oil on canvas, 82 x 62 in

Collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

 

"To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly."

-Thirteenth Century Zen Master Dogen in a passage from his Genjo-koan

 

The cover of the exhibition catalog Nathan Oliveira by Peter Selz displays what California art lovers would recognize instantly as a "classic" Oliveira canvas, Standing Man With Hands in Belt (1960).  Like so many of the large oils that first brought Oliveira's work recognition it contains a single figure set in and against a field of painterly gestures, fields, drizzles and drips. Inside the catalog, a full page is reserved for the dusky Spring Nude (1962) in which a seemingly weightless female evanesces from a salmon pink ocean of glowing, calligraphic brushwork.

Nathan Oliveira, Spring Nude, 1962

Oil on canvas, 96 x 76 in

Collection of the Oakland Museum

Paintings like these, which Oliveira executed between 1957 and 1962, when he was in his late twenties and early thirties, brought him early recognition, but also created the public perception that Oliveira was only a "figurative" artist. He was seen as a late-joiner to the Bay Area Figurative School and it is true that he attended drawing sessions with its members including David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn, who became a lifelong friend. The problem with this association, and with the early fame achieved by the artist as a young man, is that his approach to the figure was fundamentally different from that of the other San Francisco Bay Area artists. 

For over fifty years Oliveira has used the figure as the starting point for his artistic process, but not as its true subject. Something similar could be said of his animal images, his sites and fetishes of the late seventies, and of the Windhover series of recent years: they hover in they appeal to the imagination but resist easy classification.

The constant feature of Oliveira's creativity is that he has been trying to forget his subjects, not to paint them. It turns out that an artist famous for his figurative work has been working towards abstraction all his life. His work portrays the struggle of the artist's self and its consciousness to move towards a connection with the universal and the eternal. It is a struggle that begins with the perception of self and others, and which ultimately moves towards abstraction and destruction of those perceptions. 

 Oliveira's real subjects are human presence and absence.

- I always have wanted to be an abstract artist, but it had to be about something very particular. - Nathan Oliveira

When Oliveira's work gained national attention in the 1959 New Images of Man exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the world was still absorbing the horrors visited on the human body by the Holocaust in Europe and the use of nuclear weapons in Japan. In this exhibition, Oliveira's paintings were shown alongside those of leading Europeans including Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet who were creating images of the human figure that attempted to suggest the perilous condition of human beings in what seemed a bleak and Godless future.

During the same decade when Europeans painted the body to suggest the despair of this condition, Jackson Pollock one-upped the Europeans by eliminating the body from his art altogether and using dripped skeins of paint to project anxieties that were deeply personal and abstract. Just as America emerged from World War Two as the world's leading power, New York surpassed Paris as the center of modernism and abstraction won the war of modernist styles.

To understand how Oliveira became an artist, and to appreciate how quickly his ideas developed, it is necessary to consider the influences which shaped Oliveira as he grew up 3000 miles from New York, and even further from Europe.

 As a high school student first studying painting he had been thunderstruck by a Rembrandt portrait, Jooris de Caulcerii (1632) in a San Francisco museum. Although Oliveira had grown up in a Portuguese Catholic household, Rembrandt was one of the first of a long line of Northern European, Protestant artists who would speak to him through their artwork.

 

Rembrandt Harmensz Van Rijn, Joris de Caulerri, 1632oil on canvas transferred to panel 40 1/2 x 33 3/16

Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

 

Rembrandt was the first major European artist to plumb the self as artistic subject matter, and the artist's anxiety and self-doubt were his gateway to profound realizations about personality and spiritual doubt. Rembrandt, with his Protestant anxiety, offered a way of coping, through art, with a modern world that had just begun its slow divorce from the rituals and rites of Catholicism, still tinged with helpful Pagan magic and the promise that an appeased God could protect those who renounce sin.

Oliveira must have recognized a particular aliveness in the Rembrandt portrait, the aliveness of an individual man living with the anxiety and promise of a world where Calvinist thought suggested that the face of God could be glimpsed through contemplation. Rembrandt, Oliveira realized, was a kind of master magician who could conjure up this aliveness of the self through the inherently abstract medium of paint strokes on canvas. It was as if an artist who had been dead for over 300 years had reached out through the canvas and handed Nathan the brush, saying "Why don't you see what you can do with this?"

Although it was the representational art of Rembrandt which woke Oliveira up to the possibilities of painting, abstract art was a powerful force in the San Francisco Bay Area. When Oliveira enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts in 1947 Clyfford Still had been on the faculty for a year, and Mark Rothko was a summer instructor. The influence of abstraction was so powerful that by 1949 the San Francisco Annual was made up almost entirely of abstract art.

At this same time, a powerful countercurrent of Northern European art came to Bay Area in the form of exhibitions at the de Young Museum of Max Beckmann (1949), Oskar Kokoschka (1950), and Edvard Munch (1951). All three of these artists were Expressionists who relied on the story-telling possibilities of figurative art, and one of them, Max Beckmann, came to San Francisco in 1950 to teach a summer painting class which Oliveira enrolled in.
Max Beckmann, teaching in 1950
Max Beckmann , Self-Portrait

 

To study with Beckmann who disliked abstraction and called it "nail polish" was a challenging, stimulating experience for Oliveira. Some art historians have argued that the vogue of Postwar American abstraction was a kind of avoidance of historical content, and since the horrors of the holocaust and Hiroshima were honestly portrayed by photojournalism, Expressionist art seemed to have been outstripped.

Beckmann, who spoke little English, was nonetheless a compelling teacher whose very presence was a reminder of the vitality of European painting traditions. He was a fully committed artist who had endured the humiliation of Hitler's "Degenerate Art" exhibition, and a poignant exile from the vanished world of German Modernism.

By the time Oliveira graduated from art school in 1951 he had already been confronted by the powerful artistic traditions that he has spent his career integrating and resolving: figuration and abstraction. His exposure to the work of Beckmann had convinced him that painting needed to tell a story, but his storytelling immediately took on an abstract and philosophical tone.