Archie Rand at Villa Ronchi, Italy
In 1970, Archie Rand was a 21-year-old painter fresh from studies at Pratt Institute. He was working as an assistant to Larry Poons and was immersed in the formal issues and technical processes of Color Field painting. He was also a talented pianist and an aficionado of jazz and rhythm-and-blueS. In the normal course of things (at least at that point in time) these two zones of interest would never have met. Despite the history of exchanges between modernism and jazz, Greenbergian abstraction and popular African-American-based culture might as well have been on different planets. Of course they were not, and the incredibly precocious Rand was one of the first artists to not merely acknowledge this fact but to use it as a springboard for his art, in a series of works known as "The Letter Paintings."
This exhibition offered a rare chance to see a substantial portion of the series, and in an unusual setting- a recently restored 17th-century villa that is now an exhibition space for modern and contemporary art. (A smaller group from the series was also on view at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa.) Nearly all the Letter Paintings are long horizontal canvases onto which Rand transcribed names of creative individuals he admired: mostly musicians, but also some writers and artists. But rather than simply write out their names in the manner of a Conceptual art piece, he employed paintbrushes, cake icing tools, spray paint and other devices to give the names distinct visual qualities. Further, the names, which can appear singly or in voluminous lists and range from legendary innovators (Bud Powell) to lesser-known masters (Buck Clayton) and one-hit wonders like Jimmy Jones and the Pretenders, are set against painted grounds that rehearse practically all the modes of postwar abstraction, as well as adding some of Rand's own invention. While working with those staples of Post-Painterly Abstraction, acrylic paint and squeegees, Rand also embellished his canvases with blatantly decorative motifs.
Once Rand had completed the Letter Paintings, which number in the hundreds, rather than trying to capitalize on the attention that they had brought him, he embarked on quite a different direction. No more names, nor even letters. He also dropped the wide horizontal format. Instead, figuration entered his work and the decorative touches of the Letter Paintings gained more prominence. What he did retain was a preference for working in long series and an ambition to celebrate his cultural heroes, from comic-book artists to modern painters to figures from Jewish history.
Thirty years on, the way that the Letter Paintings reconcile so-called high and low, and combine information and painterliness, seems more timely than ever, as if we were only now catching up to Rand's youthful experimentation.
- By Raphael Rubinstein