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As seen in the November 2011 issue of
Western Art Collector
By the 1940s Victor Higgins, a major American artist and one of the Taos Founders, had seen, or so it seemed, his best days. The Depression, a bitter divorce from his second wife and World War II distracted the artist and the public. Higgins’s brother was managing his career, not a monumental task as the artist had only one semi-serious patron, an insurance man who drove hard bargains.
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Soliloquy at the Curtain's Fall - Victor Higgins and the "Little Gems" by Jim Balestrieri
As seen in the November 2011 issue of
Western Art Collector
By the 1940s Victor Higgins, a major American artist and one of the Taos Founders, had seen, or so it seemed, his best days. The Depression, a bitter divorce from his second wife and World War II distracted the artist and the public. Higgins’s brother was managing his career, not a monumental task as the artist had only one semi-serious patron, an insurance man who drove hard bargains.
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As seen in the November 2011 issue of
Western Art Collector
By the 1940s Victor Higgins, a major American artist and one of the Taos Founders, had seen, or so it seemed, his best days. The Depression, a bitter divorce from his second wife and World War II distracted the artist and the public. Higgins’s brother was managing his career, not a monumental task as the artist had only one semi-serious patron, an insurance man who drove hard bargains.
Drepturi de autor:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Formate disponibile
Descărcați ca PDF, TXT sau citiți online pe Scribd
Small Works&Miniatures SantaFeArt Auctions Great AmericanWestShow 51 NOVEMBER 2011 48 Soliloquyat the curtains fall 49 W E S T E R N A R T I N S I G H T S Laura Gilpin (1891-1979), Victor Higgins, Taos, New Mexico, Gelatin silver print, 1946, 7 13 / 16 x 9 11 / 16 " 1979 AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, FORT WORTH, TEXAS, BEQUEST OF THE ARTIST, P1979.130.1128 8 y the 1940s Victor Higgins, a major American artist and one of the Taos Founders, had seen, or so it seemed, his best days. The Depression, a bitter divorce from his second wife and World War II distracted the artist and the public. Higginss brother was managing his career, not a monumental task as the artist had only one semi-serious patron, an insurance man who drove hard bargains. Of his friends and comrades in Taos, Couse and Ufer had passed away. As for his painting, Higginss brand of Modernism, owing a great deal to Cezanne and the tenets of Post-Impressionism, was giving way to newer ideas that strayed ever further from the depiction of observed reality. The landscape and people of Taos, the sense of location and continuity of native culture that had attracted the likes of Sharp, Berninghaus, Phillips, Blumenschein and countless others, mattered less and less. Taos itself was changing. Modernitythe enemy of the Founderswhose inspiration sprang from the ancient ways of the indigenous peoples and the unchanging nature of the land, was coming to town, brought by the automobile and the cinema. Time was catching up with Victor Higgins. The world, it must have seemed to him, was passing him by. In his seminal monograph on the artist, Dean Porter briefly discusses an unusual Higgins canvas, executed in 1945-46. Titled Nostalgia for the Theatre, it depicts a ballet as it would be seen from the wings of the stage. Dominating the painting is an ornate white architectural element, a set piece at the side of the proscenium composed of scrollwork and feathery arabesques. The dancers, by contrast, are tiny and gathered at the extreme right of the picture plane. Porter astutely observes that the piece suggests that Higgins an all but forgotten artist at the international level, seemed to have yearned for one more day in the sun. (Victor Higgins, An American Master, p. 238.) Porter sees the work as a symbol of, a recollection, a dream world, a world that for this artist was no longer possible, (p. 238) and perhaps this is how Higgins himself saw it. To extend Porters metaphor, what Higgins yearned for was one more turn in the theater, on the big stage. But to say that Higgins had left the theater, or that the theater had abandoned him entirely, is to miss part of the point of the final chapter in the great artists career. Soliloquyat the curtains fall Victor Higgins and the Little Gems By James D. Balestrieri 50 W E S T E R N A R T I N S I G H T S The truth is that Victor Higgins responded to his diminished circumstances with grace and heroism. He built a box to hold his paint, brushes and panels, something he could hold on his lap as he painted. He turned his back on his studio, donned his three-piece suit, jumped in his car and lit out for the vistas he had spent his life getting to know, landscapes knew like the hairs on the back of his handor the hairs on his brushes. These small works were painted for the tourist trade (so Higgins confided to a dealer, according to Porter). But they were also small masterworks: swift, bold, assured. Porter quotes Blumenscheins appraisal of a group of these works, works we have come to know as the Little Gems And he put all he had into this dozen of small canvasesAll works of love: love of his simple subjects and of his craftsmanship. These pictures had the extra something that the right artist can put into his work when he is on his toes Looking at some of these works, Higgins takes the distance, the sense of feeling removed from the world and recasts it as perspective, as an embrace of the totality of the landscape. The tension between these two ways of seeing is what makes the Little Gems much more than tourist pictures. In each of the works pictured here: Rio Grande Landscape, The Red Tree, Valley Spring, the human element is just another layer in the landscape. The ploughed fields, the low adobes, the fences: all belong, all are part of the harmony of the scene. Yet they are small, without prominence, tucked in. To dip a toe into the dangerous waters of psychology, in an artist, this is a double-edged sword, this feeling of belonging to a place. In these works Higgins has come to understand how it all fits together, the abstractions that emerge from the shapes of mountains, trees, fields, homes, the composition that emerges from these abstractions. He understands this world so well that depicting it is a swift matter: a cloud is a single flourish, an aspen tree is a spray of color, details are etched into the pigment with the back of the brush. It must have been freeing for Higgins, adapting his mastery of watercolor, as evidenced in Rinconando. It was the great New York watercolorist John Marin, during a sojourn in Taos in 1929, who had inspired Higgins, and we see the fleeting energy of that medium in the handling of oil paint in the Little Gems. Yet the sense of abandon in these works, an abandonment of self, seems to signal that he is letting go of the pursuit of distinction, and that the desire to stand out, to achieve a kind of stature, was futile. Yet there are singularities in these works, gestures to this theater, the theater of Taos. In The Red Tree, oil on masonite, 12 x 17" 51 Valley SpringNew Mexico, oil on panel, 10 x 18" Rio Grande Landscape, oil on board, 12 x 19" I M A G E S
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C I T Y 52 W E S T E R N A R T I N S I G H T S The Red Tree, Rio Grande Landscape, and Valley Spring, the single trees that stand alone and apart are like actorsactors rooted in the earth, in this earth, speaking mute soliloquies in the vast indifferent (the horses in Valley Spring crop away, paying no attention) amphitheater of nature. The viewer is outside of the landscape, far off, at a distance where a sense of a whole can be perceived, a distance that precludes participation. The relationship is that of the spectator to the play, engaged, yet removed, alternating between being lost in the performance and being aware that it is a performance. Like the artist, the viewer apprehends but does not inhabit, gains perspective but forgoes involvement. Deeper, inside the reflexivity of the Little Gems, they seem to describe the relationship of artist to artwork, the gap between inspiration and execution, between imagining a performance, performing, and reflecting on the performance afterward. Perhaps they are so successful, these masterworks, these Little Gems, because they define a kind of failure, an artists feeling as he grows older that he never quite got it, got to the essence of the world he wanted the eyes of the world to take inthat this is, and always was, perhaps, impossible, that this impossibility is, in the end, the big picture, the ultimate meaning of art, that it is a striving that precludes attaining. In the Little Gems, Victor Higgins is an actor on a stage of his own making, saying lines he has written in a theater he suspected was empty. The Little Gems are vibrant, lovely, lonely paintings. Our eyes fill the seats now. About James D. Balestrieri Jim Balestrieri is director of J. N. Bartfield Galleries in New York City. He also writes the Scottsdale Art Auction catalogue and, during the sale, can be found screaming out phone bids. Jim has written plays, verse, prose, and screenplays. He has degrees from Columbia and Marquette universities, attended the American Film Institute and has an MFA in Playwriting from Carnegie- Mellon. He has an excellent wife and three enthusiastic children who, he insists, will work in finance or science, though they are taking an unhealthy interest in the arts. Victor Higginss original paint box is on display at the Eiteljorg Museum. COURTESY THE EITELJORG MUSEUM OF AMERICAN INDIANS AND WESTERN ART, INDIANAPOLIS, IN 53 Rinconando, watercolor, 17 x 22" (signed lower right)