Dance the Line: Paintings by Karl Benjamin

by Louis; Hickey Stern

Book by Benjamin, Karl; Hickey, Dave and Louis Stern Fine Arts Staff

124 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Mohammad Ali Shamekhi · Rating 2 out of 5]

کتاب مجموعه ای است از 51 اثر نقاشی کارل بنجامین. بنجامین طبق تقسیم بندی رایج یکی از سه نفر کلاسیسیت های انتزاع گرا است - همراه همرزلی و مکلفلین. البته خود این نقاشان این عنوان را برای خود نپسندیده اند و آنگونه که دیو هیکی، نویسنده ی مقدمه، می گوید بنجامین بسی زنده تر و پر شر و شورتر از آن بود که کلاسیسیت حساب شود



شهرت جهانی این نقاشان مدت زیادی طول نکشید اما این هر سه دست از کار نکشیدند و به دور از شهرت به آفرینش آثار خود ادامه دادند و شیوه ی نقاشی خود را تا قرن بیست و یکم زنده نگاه داشتند. این آثار دوباره با اقبالی از سوی نقاشان جوان روبرو شده است. دیوی در اشاره به همین مطلب می گوید

It’s also comforting to realize that Benjamin, Hammersley and McLaughlin, after their fifteen minutes of international fame as “Abstract Classicists,” in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and London, continued to flourish in the sunshine of absolute neglect, produced steadily, and created substantial bodies of work that we embrace now with amazement and a little twinge of shame for not having noticed

او در نقد کلاسیسیت خواندن آنها می گوید

It embodies a very different conception of the artist’s vocation, which, unfortunately, for pigeonhole-art-historians, has nothing to do with Abstract Classicism---the term with which curator Jules Langsner saddled Karl Benjamin, John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley and Lorser Feitelson and to which they all objected

هم او حال و هوای بنجامین را چنین توضیح می دهد

Benjamin, always, the sybaritic Hellenist, aghast at the infinity of options that his brand of oil painting promised... Even today, I can think of no other artist whose paintings exude the joy and pleasure of being an artist with more intensity than Karl Benjamin’s nor any other artist whose long teaching career has left no blemish of cynicism on his practice. He is always the kid in the candy store, the kid with the rock in his pocket drawing it out, showing it to you and exclaiming “Wow! Look at this.” As a consequence, the shape of Benjamin’s practice, driven by rigorous hedonistic curiosity, more closely resembles that of a younger generation of California artists than that of his peers. Like Edward Ruscha, Billy Al Bergsten and Peter Alexander, Benjamin doesn’t follow a path, deal with issues or aspire to a “look”. The narrative of Benjamin’s work spreads like a delta

او در توضیح از بین رفتن نزاع بر سر اولویت خط کشی و رنگ آمیزی با آمیختن آن دو توسط بنجامین چنین سخن می گوید

, chicken-egg arguments about the relative precedence of color and line, figure and ground dissolve into pleasurable confusion. If there is a rule at work in these Paintings it is, as Benjamin has remarked, to shun no color, and, as a result, there is no other painter with whom I am familiar, who can deploy and totally denaturalize colors

جالب ترین نکته برای من همین طبیعت زدایی از رنگ ها بود. تلاشی که برای برملا کردن اهمیت تک تک رنگ ها مستقل از دلالات بیرونی - مثلا دلالت رنگ سبز به پوشش گیاهی - است

As a result, no green in Benjamin alludes to foliage; no brown alludes to the dirt in which the foliage grows. Benjamin takes these hues, burdened as they are with primal references, and makes them back into free colors, live presences

این آزادی بخشی چه بسا حاصل شرایطی اجتماعی یا حداقل موازی با آن نیز هست

the physical consequences of his axiom to shun no color, speak directly to Gerhard Richter’s proposition that “all abstract painting is an allegory of social relations.” For Benjamin, the fact that no color is excluded and all colors are highly individualized, graded and nuanced by context is, in itself, a vision of the world and of society in its specificity

این سبک نقاشی در زمان خود، بعد از جتگ دوم، گسترش فراوان یافت و در کشورهای مختلف پیروان زیادی پیدا کرد

In the Post World War II period, Geometric Abstraction, or Op Art, or Hard Edge painting, or whatever you want to call it was, in fact, the dominant global idiom of that era, the true cosmopolitan language of post war art. During this era, Helio Oittica in Brazil, Raphael Soto in Venezuela, Max Bill in Germany, Jo Baer in New York, Bridget Riley in Britain, Victor Vasarely in Paris, Benjamin, McLaughlin and Hammersley in Los Angeles and hundreds of other artists created a massive body of work, which, if considered collectively, provides a much more rational precedent for the Puritanical Minimalism that followed in New York and the Hedonistic Minimalism that followed in Los Angeles

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

به نظر من این گونه نقاشی از جهتی ضروری است و آن هم التزام بیننده به دیدن فرم مستقل از محتوا. دیدن جذابیت رنگ و ریخت مستقل از دلالت های معنایی. برای من این جذابیت همیشه بوده و هنوز هم هست

[Amy in the Desert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very nice color plates. I wish it had a more in-depth analysis of his work, but it’s a good reference to keep

[Allison Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

My grandfather's paintings!