A Country Cousin with My Own Challenger

by Andrew Hudson

 

Greenberg, Louis, Noland

         

         I arrived in Washington in 1965 as a country cousin of the Washington Color Painters.  Few people knew this, as scarcely anyone saw my art.  The Washington Post’s editors were nervous about hiring an artist as their art critic.  I had to promise not to exhibit my art while I worked for them.  They felt it wouldn’t be fair to the other artists.  I became an underground painter.

 

         My two abstract paintings in this show, Turtle Green and Homage to Jack Bush, were painted in Saskatoon, Canada, in 1964.  In Saskatchewan in the summer of 1962 I met New York art critic Clement Greenberg at the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop  in the north of the province.  I’d just begun writing art criticism myself, and watching Clem critique the various artists’ work was an enormous learning experience for me.  He treated everyone’s work with the same seriousness, both eager young artists making experimental abstract paintings and older ladies quietly painting landscapes.  I saw a truly discerning critic bear down on art.

 

         I showed Clem my earliest published writings, and he was astounded that someone who lived so far away could write so well about art.  He recommended me to The Washington Post in 1965.

 

         Clem became my mentor, but I always looked at art with my own eyes, and I vowed never to quote from him, after he asked me to use my own words when I was reviewing a small exhibition of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski that he organized for the Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina in January 1963.

 

         I got to know Louis’s and Noland’s art better in the next few years.  (Clem had some fine paintings by both of them hanging in his New York apartment).  In 1964 I traveled to Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Toronto to study Clem’s show of “Post-Painterly Abstraction” in three different installations.  Clem and I had a lively correspondence discussing our take on the various paintings. In that show I saw the work of Gene Davis, Tom Downing and Howard Mehring hung alongside that of Louis and Noland.  Thus I was well primed to review Gerald Nordland’s exhibition of “The Washington Color Painters” at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, my first two weeks in Washington as the Post’s new art critic!

 

Working as artist and critic

 

         Each week at my new job I looked hard at the art I was reviewing and wrote down my reactions as clearly as I could.  Since I spoke what my eye saw, a lot of established reputations got upset.  (One art hostess declared, “Mr. Hudson, I don’t understand how you could write what you did about Josef Albers last Sunday.  I mean, it’s like attacking motherhood!”)  Meanwhile I continued painting in the back bedroom of my Georgetown apartment.  As with the two abstract paintings here, I’d bunch up a large stretch of canvas (my paintings in those days measured about 6 x 10 feet). Then I would put down small discs at odd places.  When they were dry, I’d spread out the canvas to see how they related to each other.

 

         The whole point was NOT to know how the painting would look as I was painting it.  This began from reading about Zen in Japanese art: I wanted to jump into the kind of experimentation the abstract painters had tried, at Clem’s 1962 Emma Lake Workshop, but let chance play a large part.  It was about “not knowing.”  My breakthrough painting came in 1963, at Ken Noland’s Workshop.

 

My breakthrough in 1963

 

         In August 1963 I traveled north from Saskatoon with a plan.  I asked a fellow artist at the Workshop to buy me some unbleached cotton sheeting in Prince Albert.  Then in my small cabin, I bunched up a piece of the cotton sheet, and poured and brushed into four created “valleys” an assortment of irregular ovoid shapes in diluted oil paint: two red, one black, one ocher.  That night, when the paint had dried, I took the cotton rectangle into the large painting studio to spread it out and see how the rough discs looked, together.  Noland happened to walk through the studio at that moment, there were just the two of us there, and he immediately exclaimed, “You’re taking more chances than anyone else here!”

 

         But I didn’t think too much about my experiment, and after making another similar painting, I folded both up, and went on making other type drawings and paintings in my Saskatoon apartment.  That Christmas I visited Jules Olitski in Vermont for the first time.  I had been supposed to stay with Noland, but he said to me, “I don’t have a wife right now who can cook for you, so I’ve arranged for you to stay with Jules Olitski, instead!”

  

         So I met Olitski, a complete stranger, when I got off the Greyhound bus in Bennington.  Seeing his warmly smiling round Russian face, I instantly felt that Jules and I had known each other as friends, forever.  Over the next two days, I became aware of  the risks Jules was taking in his new paintings.  This made me want to look again at my “chance” paintings from Noland’s workshop.  Back home, I stretched the first one, titled it Out of the Lake, and sent it to the Montreal Museum Spring Show.  It was accepted.

 

         I then ordered rolls of cotton duck canvas and began painting these Zen-type pictures in earnest.  While they are akin to the Washington Color Painters’ work, in being made with diluted paint on unprimed canvas, they’re entirely different, in concept.  They aren’t organized the way the Washington Color Painters’ paintings are.  There is no underlying geometrical structure or theme.  The color discs relate together by chance.

 

Three important visitors

 

         As I wrote above, very few people saw these paintings from 1964 when they were hanging in my Georgetown apartment.  But I remember distinctly two visits from three art world people.

 

         Washington art collector Vincent Melzac came by to take me out to lunch, and the instant he saw it, he lusted after Turtle Green.  He wanted to buy it, but I refused to sell it to him.  In early 1966, pioneering New York painter Barnett Newman and his wife Annalee had lunch with me at a nearby Chinese restaurant and afterwards walked to my apartment to see my work.  Barney paid me the most wonderful compliment.  He looked carefully and silently at all my paintings (Turtle Green and Homage to Jack Bush were hanging with some large paintings of the same type).  After looking, Barney didn’t say a single word.  Instead, he walked across the room and shook my hand.  That simple gesture said, “Congratulations!  You are one of us!”

 

Ken Noland as challenger

 

         To explain how I moved from that way of working to the three figurative paintings of 1981–82 in this show, I must first talk about Kenneth Noland as a challenger.   To me, the Washington Color School owed its existence to Ken’s remarkable ability to prod other artists into improving their work.  He initiated a keen, penetrating dialogue with Morris Louis after he met him at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts, on their first evening of teaching there.  And Ken’s give-and-take extended to other artists.

 

         Louis said of their initial meeting, “Suddenly I was no longer alone”; Ken’s wife at the time, Cornelia Reiss, said Ken couldn’t stop talking about this artist he had just met.  They discovered they had the same taste about contemporary art: both admired the probity of Pollock, Still, Hofmann, Motherwell and Gottlieb; both detested de Kooning’s gestural way of painting which caught on so strongly among other artists, that it rapidly became a cliché.

 

         Ken began to invite his best students at Catholic University, Thomas Downing and Howard Mehring, to join him and Louis for drinks after their evening classes.  How these younger artists must have benefited from their elders’ conversation!

 

         Ken also had an influence on Gene Davis’s art.  Davis used to claim that he was a self-taught artist, but the truth was that he hired the erudite, kind-hearted Jacob Kainen to critique his work and teach him about art on a regular basis.  When Kainen left town for a vacation, Ken was the substitute teacher.  Ken arranged for Gene Davis’s first exhibition in the Dupont Circle Cinema lobby.

 

         More important than Ken’s influence on Washington art was his powerful effect on a couple of artists from other countries, Anthony Caro from England and Jack Bush from Canada.  In 1959, before he met Ken, Tony had met Clem at a London art party and invited him to see his work in his studio.  Clem told Tony his figurative sculptures deriving from Henry Moore weren’t that good.  Around that time the first exhibitions of the new American painting, one of Jackson Pollock and a group show assembled by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, were shown in London at the spacious Whitechapel Art Gallery.  This work, and Clem’s studio talk, made Tony desperately anxious to visit the United States.  He got a Ford Foundation travel grant, and came.  He saw for the first time the abstract welded metal sculpture of the American pioneer David Smith and he had a seminal, stirring conversation in New York with Ken. 

 

         They talked until 3 in the morning, when Ken had to catch the milk train back to Washington.  Tony was so revved up by Ken’s conversation, that the first thing he did on returning to London was to set himself up to make welded metal sculpture.  The first metal sculpture he made, titled Twenty-Four Hours, has a circle shape in it as a homage to Ken’s early Circle paintings.

 

         Thanks to Ken, Tony was now off and running as a radical, innovative sculptor.  He made horizontal works rather than vertical ones, like David Smith.  He painted each of them a vibrant single color, gave them no pedestal so they sprawled across the floor.  Like Ken, Tony enthused younger artists: he raised up six excellent sculptors from his students at the St. Martin’s School of Art.

 

Ken’s challenge to Jack Bush

 

         Jack Bush was shaken up by a visit from Clem to his Toronto studio in 1957.  Clem suggested Jack be more daring and make oil paintings akin to his free-flowing spontaneous watercolors.  Jack eventually found his way forward.  Then in 1962, when Jack was on the last leg of a Canada Council travel grant which had taken him to Europe, he talked with Ken Noland in New York. 

 

         Jack often told the story of this key conversation with Ken.  Ken asked Jack what art he’d seen in Europe that impressed him.  Jack replied it was the old masters, such as Velasquez, whose work he’d only seen in reproduction.  Ken pressed him further, asking Jack what modern art he’d gone for.  Jack replied instantly, two large Matisse cut-outs that he saw in Zurich.  Ken then said, “Why don’t you go out and beat him?”  And he laughed and walked away.  This got Jack thinking, “What do I have to lose?  If I aim to beat him, Matisse won’t mind!”  He set out to compete with Matisse, and became one of the best Color Painters of all time.

 

         Like Ken and like Tony, Jack also stimulated younger artists to do better, encouraging them and setting an example.  The exhibition that I organized for the Hirshhorn Museum in 1977, titled “14 Canadians: A Critic’s Choice,” included work by eight Toronto painters: Jack, and seven of the artists he had inspired.

 

         Clem used to say that to make an art scene, you just need one major artist in a city.  Ken had an effect in Washington, Tony had an effect in London, and Jack had an effect in Toronto, similar to that of Manet in Paris a hundred years earlier, when Manet’s conversation sparked off the Impressionists.  When Ken left Washington, when Tony stopped teaching in London, after Jack died in Toronto, the work of artists they’d lifted up fell down in quality.  That stimulus from a living major artist was so crucial!

         

Ken Noland’s challenges at Emma Lake,1963

 

         I first met Kenneth Noland at Clement Greenberg’s New York apartment in early summer 1963.  Ken was to come lead that year’s Emma Lake Artists Workshop, on Clem’s recommendation.  At that time he was Clem’s favorite person to walk with around the New York galleries.  In 1962 Clem remarked to us on Ken’s good “eye.”  Ken almost didn’t come to Saskatchewan because of a car accident, but he recovered in time.  (Jules Olitski, who led the Workshop in 1964, would have been his replacement.)

 

         Ken challenged us in his Workshop talks.  He said, “Good art isn’t good enough when there’s the possibility of great art.”  “Use everything that comes at you as a resource to make your art better: failures, successes, criticisms.  Turn everything into a challenge.”

 

         He said, “Jazz men listen to each other now, criticizing the truth of each other’s sound.”  He thought this was also beginning be true of New York painters, using competitiveness in a good way, challenging each other to be true and right, inside themselves.

 

         He urged us to “search to do things in a truthful way, your own way.”  And he added: “It’s too late to paint in the Louis-Noland way, because it’s now an established convention.  Start in opposition, work hard for eight years.”

         

         “Don’t submit to an admiration of other artists’ work.  Deny yourself.  Keep this sense of discovery for your own work.”

 

The change in my art

 

         Comparing my figurative paintings of 1981–82 to my abstract paintings of 1964, it might look as though I must have obeyed Noland’s admonition and worked hard in opposition to Louis and Noland for eight years.  But that’s not how it happened.

 

         With Anthony Caro and Jack Bush, it was a double whammy that shook them up and got them going: a studio visit from Clem, followed by a long, challenging conversation with Ken Noland.  But I never took my art to show Clem, and I never discussed the development of my work with Ken.  I didn’t need either of them, for I had a quite different challenger of my own: the Washington area artist Blaine Larson, who has been for me for over forty years an exceptionally sharp and challenging critic and teacher. 

 

         The change in my art happened naturally and organically.  I have always liked to draw (I had a very good drawing teacher at the Slade School in London, Patrick George).  I believe that it’s in my genes that I especially like to draw people.  My great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were miniature portrait painters in London who were put out of business by the arrival of photography, though they put up a valiant fight to continue on. 

 

         While I was still working for the Post, I joined a drawing group that met at the Hinkley-Brohel Gallery in Georgetown on Sunday mornings for four hours.  It was a marathon of drawing from the nude.  After that I drew with a little group of artists at a place on Columbia Road, and it was there that I met the model Marilyn van Eaton, whom I instantly recognized as superlative at her vocation.  She instinctively knew how to choose a pose that would be interesting for an artist to draw.  Art students all over Washington said how she stood out from the other models and was inspiring to work with.  I hired her to be my personal model and after three years, when she realized I was gay, she introduced me to Tom Pattison who became my next regular model.

 

My model Tom

 

         Tom and I worked together for seventeen years; we became very close comrades.  He was extremely good-looking (some of my gay friends thought him the handsomest man in Washington).  He and Marilyn (and later, he and Bill Dunlop, or he and Nicola Bastian) thought up fun poses to do as a couple, and we all enjoyed our work together.  We were like a ballet or ice-skating duo, or the members of a string quartet, happily performing in harmony.  It was like having a little family.  Indeed, when Tom died of AIDS on September 2, 1994, I felt I had lost a brother: we had been so connected.  Tom was generous and sweet-natured, and he often helped me with stretching paintings or getting them photographed.

 

Blaine Larson as critic

 

         In the late 1960s, I tried making little disc abstract paintings with acrylic paint but it wouldn’t soak into the canvas like my diluted oil paint, not even mixed with photographers’ water tension breaker (Helen Frankenthaler’s secret weapon).  I made little oil paintings of still lives, roof tops and models, but because I’m allergic to turpentine and white spirit fumes, these had to be made very quickly.  Having difficulty with my paint medium, I began drawing models with colored pencils on paper, and taking a tip from Paul Klee, switched to drawing with my right hand, instead of my left.  (I’m somewhat ambidextrous and I felt that my dominant left hand, close to Cezanne, knew too much, whereas my right hand, more innocent and free, was more akin to Matisse!)

 

         When I asked Blaine Larson for advice on what to show at the Jefferson Place Gallery in 1972, he said my drawings were much better than my paintings, and to only show them.  So it became a two-person exhibition of my drawings and Jennie Lee Knight’s sculptures.  I realized that Blaine was absolutely right, and we began critiquing each other’s art on a regular basis.

 

What came after the Color School

 

         I had picked Blaine out from among the local artists when I was critic to The Washington Post.   Though the works were mixed, in terms of quality, I gave positive reviews to his first two solo shows in 1965 and 1967, and had a photograph reproduced with my column both times.  (It was rare that I chose photographs of local artists’ work.)  Reviewing Blaine’s first show I wrote:  

 

         It’s good to see such an interesting and, in some ways, provocative first one-man show.  I hope these paintings by [Larson] are an indication that there is a new generation of serious advanced painters springing up in Washington to follow the Color Painters.  The true measure of the vitality of any art center is the number of good artists it produces.

 

         Two years and four months later, in a review of the Corcoran  Gallery’s 18th Area Exhibition, in Artforum magazine’s March 1968 issue, I singled out Blaine’s painting Yellow #2 as “the most daring work in the show, the one going most against safe taste.”  I wrote that he was “the one young abstract painter of promise [in Washington] who does not relate at all to the Color School.”

 

         A desire to assess was happening in Washington after the Color School lay behind my choice of artists for the exhibition “Ten Washington Artists 1950–1970” that I curated for the Edmonton Art Gallery, Canada, in 1970.  I selected works by the five senior artists who indubitably made up the Color School, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, and Howard Mehring; and I put with them works by five younger artists, Michael Clark (who had been a student of Downing at the Corcoran School), Sam Gilliam, Blaine Larson, Jennie Lee Knight, and Rockne Krebs.  To my gratification the work of the latter held up against that of the former; the only exceptions were a large Gilliam drape painting hung from all four walls of a gallery, and an environment of laser beams designed by Krebs.  To me, these two separate rooms were like sideshows at a fair, not serious art like the other work in the exhibition.

 

         Some of the artists flew to Edmonton for the opening.  Blaine arrived carrying a very small suitcase containing a toothbrush and the first catalogues made by our Baltimore printer.  This catalogue is a historic document, as it includes the only lengthy artistic statement by Morris Louis (his Baltimore student Helen Jacobson’s memory of his remarks while teaching), the first lengthy statement by Kenneth Noland (my own notes on what Ken said at his Emma Lake Artists Workshop in 1963), and a photo sequence of work produced by the ten artists I selected between 1950 and 1970.

 

Blaine Larson as challenger 

 

         In long conversations I had with Ken Noland at his place in Vermont in 1975, Ken spoke of his 1950s dialogue with Louis: 

 

         A lot of the things we talked about, Morris did, in painting.  It was  more theoretical for me: I couldn’t make a practical application of the theories we discussed.  Morris was so intelligent, so ripe––a lot of the talk he could turn, immediately, into paintings.

 

         Blaine and I have had this kind of talk on our visits to one another’s studio.  What could we do in our art, to make it better, stronger, more wild and more daring?  Humility was needed to receive each other’s critique.  I quickly learned to trust Blaine’s “eye,” as he did, mine.  Thanks to Blaine, I saw that work I thought was successful, was merely clever; that work I was embarrassed about, was my true artistic self, pointing the way for me to go!

 

         Sometimes one of us would tell the other none of his new work was any good.  We wanted complete honesty, a no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled response.  One time when I said nothing was any good, Blaine replied, “Oh, I’m so glad to hear you say that!  I thought it was too literary!”  In the summer of 1990, he said all my drawings of two new models were no good, and suggested I redraw the drawings to make them looser.  This led to my creating playful, imaginary characters and scenes, a new departure for me.  I made a long series, Mr. No and Mr. Yes: 92 Drawings from 1990–1992.  This led to my Buddha Facepaintings and a series of work on The Buddha Meets St. Francis of Assisi in New Mexico.

 

         Blaine’s highest words of praise are, “It’s unconscionable!”  Whenever I’ve heard that, I’ve known that I’ve hit the jackpot, scored a bull’s-eye.  Those words told me that I’d achieved true wildness and originality, reached the peak of my artist’s dream.  For me, Blaine’s critiques have been the word of God speaking.  In my little international art career in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it didn’t matter what anyone else said or wrote.  Blaine had approved the work, therefore it was good, and that was that!  

 

         Blaine’s painting students at the Corcoran School said how right-on, how encouraging his criticisms were.  In my non-studio courses, I had my students read books written by artists.  A favorite book was The Brutality of Fact, a series of interviews with the painter Francis Bacon conducted by the critic David Sylvester.  To me, Bacon expresses all the right attitudes about making art in this book, but in practice, the paintings he produced are another matter.

 

         What’s relevant here is that in his second interview, in May 1966, Francis Bacon lamented that he hadn’t found another artist with whom he could have tough studio criticisms:

 

         I’ve always hoped to find another painter I could really talk to––somebody whose qualities and sensibility I could really believe in––who really tore my things to bits and whose judgment I could actually believe in.… I think it would be marvelous to have somebody

who would say to me, “Do this, do that, don’t do this, don’t do that!” and give you the reasons!  I think it would be very helpful…. I long for people to tell me what to do, to tell me where I go wrong.

 

         Poor Bacon!  If he’d found such an artist, we might all have been saved acres of his inflated literary paintings.  Sylvester, who worshipped him on a pedestal, was no help to Bacon, at all.  Bacon’s cry from the heart helps me see how extraordinarily lucky both Blaine and I were, to have found each other.  Twenty years after Louis and Noland’s seminal dialogue here in Washington, two other high-reaching artists met one another here and proceeded to forcefully push each other to make their art better.

 

         My efforts and Blaine’s efforts often ran parallel.  We’d both be working on paper, both decide to switch to canvas.  Because of my allergies, I didn’t work on canvas for seven years.  A Toronto artist, Paul Fournier, suggested I try drawing with soft pastel into wet acrylic matte medium.  I had a hard time adjusting to this new technique, and kept stumbling over myself, so it was quite a while before Blaine okayed my forays.  Finally, I succeeded: my work passed Blaine’s critical “eye.”  Bill Leaning on Doorframe, Marilyn with Teddy Bear,1979,my first successful large painting made this way, was included in our two-man show at the Corcoran Gallery in 1981–82, appropriately titled On-GoingDialogue.  That display of our interaction occurred after we’d critiqued each other’s work for ten years.  We’ve gone on for another thirty!

 

How to make the grounds

 

         I made the three figurative paintings included here on lengths of unstretched canvas stapled to a board.  The edges of the painting weren’t decided in advance.  The abstract painters Noland, Olitski, and Larry Poons created a continuum of paint on canvas, from which they chose the eventual painting.  I’d do this as a figurative artist!  It was fun to decide where the actual painting “was”!

 

         Blaine was good at seeing where I should crop the canvas.   In The Most Heroic Pose Yet of Tom Nude, the small oval giving my signature and date at upper right came from the part of the canvas cropped away.  Blaine saw that if my drawing of his double diamond painting hit the right edge, it would make my painting more dynamic, hence the crop!  The oval collage hits the top edge!         

 

         Blaine once gave me a great lesson on destroying parts of a painting that I was holding on to:

 

         He…. gave me a graphic demonstration of how to cut out cameos and collages in a truly non-caring, non-precious way.  I was about to carefully cut out two heads from a canvas, in order to “preserve” them, when he said, “Try it this way!” and brought out from the kitchen a papier-maché tray and the plastic wash-up basin, and threw them at random on the canvas––and where they landed became the areas to cut.

 

         Like Matisse, I included the art on my walls in my drawings and paintings of the models.  (Art and life became one thing!)  To make my drawing of the models non-caring, I deliberately drew the background art works first, to loosen up my hand.   In Paul and Tom Reclining with Images of Marilyn, Bob and Bill,the sketchy figures come from the paintings behind them.  The “fried egg” shape of my abstract painting Turtle Green is there, in Most Heroic Pose, as well as a double diamond painting by Blaine.  The green oval with red blobs is one of his late 1960s “Mushroom” paintings.

 

         So much for the drawing.  (I drew Tom so often, I used to say I could draw him with my eyes closed and my hands behind my back!)  The other factor, the wet matte medium grounds, became a problem.  I’d started by brushing on two coats, one to prime the canvas, the other to draw into, so it glued down my pastel.  To be lively, later on I sprinkled dry powdered color into the medium.  After a while, Blaine said I’d become too conscious of the colored ground as I drew: it was too much of “an art thing.”  Maybe I could have the models prepare the grounds for the next posing session.  

 

         We tried this, but Blaine declared the new grounds were “too uptight and still in the Andrew Hudson style.”  Much better would be to have children create the grounds, “who don’t have the respect for art.”  Blaine himself had recently thrown out the approach of “making the act of painting into an important event.”  Over and over again I saw that the lesson both Blaine and I were constantly learning, was the importance of “innocence” versus “intention.”

 

         I began to throw skeins and puddles of acrylic paint into the grounds and then to roll on thick paint blobs with a roller.  Tom Posing as Poseidon and Most Heroic Pose are examples of this.

         

Great art versus good art

 

         Mindful of Ken Noland’s challenge: “Good art isn’t good enough when there’s the possibility of great art,” I sometimes wonder how far Blaine and I have reached, in our work.  I suspect we’ve both hit greatness, on occasion.

 

         I still remember how thrilled I was to see Blaine’s Three Musicians, a three piece work painted on wooden shapes that leaned against the wall, in the context of the main gallery of my “Ten Washington Artists” show at the Edmonton Art Gallery, in 1970.  Blaine’s Three Musicians stood forthrightly on its own, and maintained its individuality, next to Morris Louis’s superlative Beta-Psi, one of Louis’s very best “Unfurled” paintings, and Kenneth Noland’s majestic horizontal stripe painting Magus of 1967.  (Louis rightly saw the last paintings from his “Unfurled” series of 1960–61 as his highest achievement.)

 

         In February 2015, I saw Louis’s Beta-Psi again.  I traveled to Ottawa to see a wonderful Jack Bush retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada.  After his big move in 1958 Jack never let up: he went on and on, always such radiant, heart-warming paintings!

 

         Connected to this show the National Gallery assembled a room titled “Jack Bush and Color Field Art” in an upstairs gallery. When I entered Room B206, I felt I’d stepped into heaven, for the room was full of absolute masterpieces.  Three paintings by Jack were hanging with works by fellow artists he’d admired.  There were two paintings by Jules Olitski, one a small work that Jules had given to Jack and titled after him; Anthony Caro’s daring sculpture The Horse stood close by Jack’s painting Tony’s Horse, inspired by it.  Two Washington Color School paintings blazed forth: a great Kenneth Noland spare Circle painting, Spring Cool of 1962, and Morris Louis’s Beta-Psi that reigned in splendor over the entire room.  Here both artists reached the very pinnacle of art.

 

         I don’t know where Blaine and I stand on the spectrum.  I saw Blaine’s Three Musicians hold its own against Louis’s Beta- Psi back in 1970, and I’d guess that works from Blaine’s double-diamond series and some of his 1996 bronze-on-black paintings based on Dante’s Inferno would hold up, too.

 

         For myself, I’ll quote something that Tom Pattison said about himself and my other models in an interview for a catalogue book in 1986 called Andrew Hudson: A Glimpse Behind the Canvas:

         

         We used to say jokingly that we were making art history with our modeling sessions.  Though we joked about it, I felt that we were

doing something important in modeling for Andrew and that our work together would outlast us all.