Editor’s note: Earlier this fall, David Yezzi of The New Criterion interviewed the painter Rackstraw Downes at his apartment and studio in SoHo in Manhattan.
DAVID YEZZI: You came to this country first as a teenager?
RACKSTRAW DOWNES: I came here because of jazz, and I went to a prep school in Connecticut. There was a man there who’d freshly graduated from under Josef Albers and was very, very full of this enthusiasm and so on. It was very fresh to me coming out of England. England, you know, didn’t really catch on to the idea of modern, twentieth-century painting very fast. There were very few modern paintings around, very, very few, and there was nothing in the museums, really. I came here and went to MOMA and then out to Philadelphia and saw the Arensberg Collection, and I was absolutely astonished. I mean there was nothing in the Tate like that.
DY: Have you ever been back to paint in England?
RD: No. When I got here, I was here for thirteen years before I ever went back at all. When I did go back, I went into the National Gallery, and I thought, I understand why Marinetti wants to blow up museums. It’s impossible to work with the weight of all this terrific stuff on your shoulders. How could you? All those people in Vienna who want to bomb the opera, and that kind of thing (laughs)? I understood it immediately. It was just a complete, instantaneous flash.
When I got off the plane, I went into a bookshop to try and get a book edited by Arthur Koestler, based on a symposium called Beyond Reductionism. I went into this bookstore, and I said, You don’t have this collection of essays, do you, from this symposium called Beyond Reductionism, by any chance? And he said, “Oh gracious me, no. I feel a bit beyond reductionism myself this morning” (laughs). Oh my God, I thought, this is why I left that miserable island. It’s such a snotty island, and they deal with things they don’t want to have to deal with by being snotty about it. This country is not snotty. There’s a lot of interesting things about America that I don’t necessarily like, but it is not snotty at all.
DY: At Yale, Al Held was there, and you were working on abstract paintings.
RD: Well, you see, I’d picked up an interest in abstract geometrical art from that man who had studied with Albers. His name is Robert Speier. When I arrived at Yale, I was interested in Ben Nicholson. Between prep school and Yale, I had developed rather British attitudes to geometrical abstraction, and if I hadn’t gotten into Yale I was going to try to study in England with Victor Passmore, who was teaching there at that time. When I got to Yale, I was very shocked by a lot of things. My sensibility changed rapidly and got Americanized. I had thought that Stuart Davis was just about the most vulgar painter I’d ever seen in my life. I couldn’t stand it (laughs). And I remember saying so, and Alex Katz said, “Oh no, every time you go past a gas station, it looks like a Stuart Davis.” And I said, “Well, yes, that’s true” (laughs). And then he tipped me off to Al Held. It was Katz who told me to go and look at Held.
DY: And what effect did that have on your painting?
RD: I was immediately blown away. That was very important, that change-over from a British to an American sensibility. I mean, that robust sensibility of Held was very muscular and is so different from Nicholson, who was involved with “taste.” I think “taste” in a way has some sort of class implication, as almost everything in England does. You know, if Nicholson drew something representational, it would somehow be a beautiful façade of some fourteenth-century church near Florence or something. He wouldn’t do a gas station. It would have to have some aristocratic stamp. It has to be approved over the centuries.
DY: In the 1960s, you moved away from abstraction.
RD: Yes, I just dumped it one day (laughs). After Yale, I was working in Pennsylvania. I had a fellowship to the University of Pennsylvania, and I was surrounded by Greenberg disciples. I’d never heard that Greenberg dogma before. Greenberg was not big at Yale at all. We didn’t discuss him very much. We didn’t discuss him at all, as far as I remember. There was no Color Field painting going on at Yale then. There was one student who had gotten up about as far as Barnett Newman, but Newman was considered somewhat dubious. Mostly it was a kind of de Kooning-esque school.
At Penn, I met these people who wanted me to exhibit with them, and they showed me a manifesto they had published, which had a Greenbergian line in it. And I was very shocked. I didn’t like the deterministic nature of that criticism at all. I was married at the time to Janet Fish, who was already painting realistic still lifes, and I thought it was just fine to be doing that, too. I said, I won’t show with you if you publish a manifesto, but if you don’t say anything I’ll show with you (laughs). They did actually give a manifesto to the local paper, which published it, The Philadelphia Inquirer or something. I was very annoyed with them. I had these snakelike forms in my painting that derived from Miró, and I just put a head and tail on one of these and stuck the picture in [the show]. I wanted somehow to say, No, you know I really mean, No. I went to that show and looked at it, and I thought, You know these paintings are very big and they’re a bit empty. So I said to the person I was with, “You know I think I’d like to paint the whole world on a postcard,” and in a funny way, though I never thought about that remark until years later, that was what I did, in a way.
DY: I wanted to ask you about how you arrived at the scale in your paintings.
RD: Good question. Yes, scale was exactly the most important thing for me for years, and it was very difficult. I remember going up to Maine, because I bought this old place in Maine. I went there every summer. I remember going there and thinking, What size should these paintings be this year?, and having a great deal of difficulty getting the scale right. I remember abandoning something saying, It should be smaller or it should be a little bigger. Getting that scale and the relationship of the mark to the surface of the painting till the mark began to disappear became a very major, major consideration for me in my work.
DY: Your panoramas are so expansive, and you get the feeling of that size when you look at them, yet I think it was Sanford Schwartz who referred to yours as almost a miniaturist aesthetic. Do you ever work with magnifying lenses?
RD: No. One year, though, I had a show at Jill Kornblee’s, and Jill was sitting there one day and saw an elderly gentleman come in and look at one of my paintings through a magnifying glass. She got up and went over, and she said, “What are you looking for? That’s a modern painting!” (laughs). And I thought, you know that isn’t a modern painting. My reaction at the time was, Jill you didn’t get that quite right. That guy was right, actually.
By that time, I had been back to Europe. It was after the thirteen years, and my first trip back to Europe I went to Belgium and Holland to look at Dutch and Flemish painting. I expected to be interested in Dutch landscapes, but I was most interested in Flemish painters, those complex paintings. I was knocked out by van Eyck and van der Weyden and all those people, and I couldn’t believe that degree of narrative detail they got in there. I’d been brought up on Manet and Impressionism or Goya or Velásquez, Grand Manner painting where you stand back with a long brush. It was astonishing to me, that [Flemish] stuff. I had never looked at it before or thought about it.
DY: Yet despite these influences, there is nothing antiquated about your work.
RD: My painting starts definitely from New York painting around 1950, where you put paint on very directly, opaquely, and you just start in. You don’t do an undercoating in bitumen or what have you and slowly build it up with glazes. It’s nothing to do with Old Master painting at all. It comes out of twentieth-century American painting.
We were all in love with de Kooning, when we were at school. As far as I was concerned, people like Jane Freilicher and Katz, Neil Welliver, and Fairfield Porter, of course, came out of that sensibility in some respect. I mean Freilicher studied with Hans Hofmann, and some of her very early paintings are virtually abstract.
DY: You’ve said that it took you a while, as a young painter, to be won over by the work of Fairfield Porter. How did you get from abstract painting to representation and realism?
RD: In the summer of 1965, I was in a rented house in Maine with Janet Fish and one of Janet’s friends. They went out together landscaping together, and I painted abstractions in the garage. Then I bought a farm up there, and my fantasy was that I would go up there and paint abstractions in the barn. During that winter, I had a sort of crisis, where I felt stuck. Also, I’d had this quarrel over the exhibition in Philadelphia, which I mentioned. All these things happened at once: I felt stuck, and I had this violent anti-Greenbergian passion. Also, I felt trapped in a set of stylistic decisions. I went into a painting knowing every edge was going to be hard, and every color was going to be an absolute color, and that I would have to look for a long time for a subject made out of these ingredients.
It was the exact opposite of standing out in a field and saying, “That’s what I’m going to do, but I don’t know how I’m going to do it.” In those abstract paintings, I entered the painting thinking, I know how I’m going to do it, but I don’t know what I’m going to do. All these shapes kept coming out that referred back to Held or they referred back to Leger, or they referred to Mondrian in some way or to Arp. That was the range. I was also very interested in Miró’s Symbolism. I went to Hokusai, and I tried to introduce fish and waves; I tried to introduce imagery. Once I put that tail and that head on that snake, you see, I felt like I needed to take some kind of stand over all this. But it wasn’t working; it seemed very flat.
When I got to Maine, I made these hard-edged drawings of plants. Gradually, as the summer wore on, I saw that these bushes weren’t stationary and that the edges were not absolute. They flickered in the breeze, and the colors were infinitely subtle. There was no hard edge at all, and I needed to introduce this tremble, which was terribly difficult to do. I didn’t know how to do it. It took me a whole summer of drawing every day, and by the end of the summer, I was making drawings that trembled, where there was shimmering foliage, where there was no longer just this static shape. The hard lines around a mass of foliage, that all disappeared that summer.
DY: Did people remark on this new project?
RD: Nobody saw it. I was alone. I had separated from Janet Fish before I went up there. I was in a very unhappy frame of mind about my life, but I got on with my work.
DY: Do you ever revisit the places that you’ve painted?
RD: Yes, I sometimes do go back, and it’s very peculiar. I have to tell you that about 70 percent, or maybe higher, of the sites that I’ve painted no longer exist when I go back to them. It’s astonishing the rapidity with which things change. I went up to teach at Skowhegan a few summers ago. I stopped in Portland and elsewhere on my way there, and there was only one of five or six sites that I’d painted a few years before that was still there in any recognizable form. Then, of course, we’ve got the World Trade Center; that’s not there any more. I was on 110th and Broadway recently, and almost all the buildings on those corners are gone.
DY: How do you find the sites? How did you get out to Texas, for example?
RD: It’s always chance. In the 1980s, Jean Wetta, who was curating a show at a little college in Texas City on the coast, called me and invited me down to give a talk. It was February, and I had been working out in the Meadowlands in New Jersey. On the Texas coast, it was all marsh grasses just like the Meadowlands. It was the same damned egrets and herons, same wildlife and petrochemical stuff sticking up all over the place. And it was seventy-five degrees in the middle of February! A couple of years later, I made arrangements to go down there and work one winter. I went back for fifteen more years.
I was in Houston, Galveston actually, for many winters, and people said, “You’ve got to go out to Marfa. It’s really beautiful, really impressive. Judd’s work looks beautiful out there,” and everything. And I thought, oh yeah, I’ll get there some day. Then I had a friend who was going out to Marfa to work. I was having a winter in which I was waiting for the weather to change in order to finish a painting, and I thought, Now that I’ve got time, I’m going to go. Dolores Johnson was a consultant to the Chinati Foundation, and I went out there with her and drove around in the landscape and looked at it. I’d spent many years painting in New Jersey and South Texas, where the landscape is absolutely flat, and here were mountains. They weren’t those monstrous things in Utah and Colorado, totally overwhelming. They were smaller and very interesting shapes. And I thought, I ought to take a crack at the mountains. You know, can you paint a mountain without being sentimental about it, without it looking silly? Can you make a contemporary painting that is viable in terms of sensibility and so on?
When I went back to Marfa the next year, I didn’t paint the mountains at all. I painted Judd’s structures, because in the meantime I’d painted the inside of the World Trade Center. So I went and painted the interiors of Judd’s buildings, which I thought were fantastic. I became a fan of Judd’s work, after living in the midst of it for a while.
DY: You find the sites on foot, you find them by car?
RD: By car, yeah. In Texas, you find them by car. In New York, I walk around. I take the train or the subway or the bus to some neighborhood and walk around a lot.
DY: Does the narrative quality of a landscape strike you immediately, or does it emerge as you paint?
RD: Both. It can go both ways. Sometimes you see something and you say, Oh, that’s interesting. I’ve painted a number of landfills over the years. I’d think, Where is the landfill around here, never mind what it looks like? And I’d go to the landfill and say, I’ll work from here. So it can go either way.
Sometimes you find out what’s going on in a landscape as you go. People stop by and tell you things. When I show slides, I go into considerable detail about what’s going on in the painting, and people say, Well, how do you do your research? Well, I don’t do any research. I stand there and draw, and somebody comes up and tells me.
DY: Do you think of your work as having an overarching theme to which each new work contributes, or is each painting separate?
RD: I think about that issue. Sometimes I think, Am I repeating myself? That’s one thing I don’t want to do. And you think to yourself, Maybe I have to have a new lease on life, start all over again like Janáček. Or Yeats. Or you think, I will go on like Elliott Carter has to a very great age. You have all sorts of thoughts, but certainly one thought is, Am I repeating myself? You know years ago, when I started painting from observation, I thought that, by changing what I look at, I will inevitably give myself new painting problems. That doesn’t always happen. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes you can carry with you the structure of a painting, like the wide-angle view, for example, and start applying it to anything that’s out there. After a show I had at Marlborough Gallery in 1997, I vowed never to do a long painting again. Now, I’ve since done many, but I didn’t for a while. I worked very hard at other formats.
DY: In your paintings of landfills, it’s striking how gorgeous the garbage is. I mean, it’s garbage.
RD: Yeah, it is garbage. I think art without any sense of mischief about it tends to get a little prim or something. So there’s a little mischief going on at the dump. I remember one time I had a friend visiting me in Maine, and I was trying to finish this painting. It was Labor Day weekend. I said, You know, I’m terribly sorry, but for the Labor Day picnic I’m going to be at the dump. She said, We’ll have the picnic at the dump. She showed up at the dump in her little rental car and her heels and a big hat (she was Southern), with a lot of food that she had bought. We sat down on the damn dump, and she said, “This is a fine dump!” (laughs). I thought, This is very nice; I like this. So I can’t stand that kind of buttoned-up feeling about these things.
