In this essay, critic Dave Hickey relates the clarity and apparent ease of surfing and jazz to the Hard Edge painting style by artists like Karl Benjamin, John McLaughlin, Lorser Feitelson, and Frederick Hammersley.

Hard Edge painting refers to a style of painting comprising sharply defined forms of pure color placed adjacent to one another to enhance or diminish a contrast or a color scheme. Hard edge painting therefore often manifests in geometric abstraction, where triangles, rectangles, stripes, and other shapes are juxtaposed within the pictorial space without blurring or blending. Benjamin, McLaughlin, Feitelson, and Hammersley’s work in this mode was popularized in the landmark 1959 exhibition Four Abstract Classicists, curated by Jules Langsner, which was shown in Los Angeles and in the United Kingdom.

Like the apparent free-form nature of surfing and jazz, hard edge painting appears simple; also like surfing and jazz, it represents a mastering of the basics, technique, and the performance of ease in order to be executed successfully.

Hard edge painting is strongly associated with Southern California, where the physical and intellectual distance from the East Coast’s abstract expressionism and its surrounding philosophies gave way to an understanding of the world informed by saturated color, flat surfaces, and dramatic shifts in terrain.

Essay by Dave Hickey, originally published in the catalogue for Karl Benjamin: Dance the Line at Louis Stern Fine Arts, 2007.

When I was a kid, we lived in Pacific Palisades in a house that hung off the cliff overlooking the Pacific. Eventually, years later, that house would slide down onto the PCH, but we were long gone by then. During those years, I wanted to surf, that was it. I wanted to haul my clunky board up and down the concrete steps leading to the beach, sometimes, out of sheer exhaustion, sliding my board on the stair-rails. My Dad wanted me to listen to jazz or, more precisely, he didn’t want me to bother him while he listened to jazz. I didn’t mind this. I would even ride with him down to Hermosa Beach to the Lighthouse where one could listen to jazz in one’s wet bathing trunks. My Mom wanted me to ride all over Los Angeles with her looking for art, up to Hollywood, out to Pasadena, to San Marino, and over to Claremont. When we found some art (usually hanging on white pegboard wall with an adjacent rubber plant), we would look at it. I resisted these trips mightily but, as it turned out, I was never more than a B- surfer and at best a B+ musician. I was, however, an A+ looker at art.

So, even then, as unwilling as I was to traipse around, I still had my favorites. I liked the hardedge stuff by Fred Hammersley, Karl Benjamin, and John McLaughlin. It reminded me, somehow, in its apparent effortlessness, of the claritas of surfing where one must never be seen to be trying very hard. My mom, who had a darker vision of the world, liked Rico LeBrun and other artists whose work looked like it hurt to make. She said I would learn when I grew up but I never did. Even so, I have to thank her here for the privilege I have today, of writing, in my maturity, about the first art I liked as a feckless youth, especially for the pleasure of visiting a career that has paralleled my own at one remove. Not many of one’s youthful enthusiasm survive with us into adulthood, of course, so I am embarrassed to this day about Colin Wilson, Herman Hesse and George Battaile. On the Road, however, is still a great book and Karl Benjamin is still a great painter, not just a neglected local, not just a victim of fashion’s whim, but a genuinely world class practitioner who has, as they say in Georgia, hoed his own row.

Having grown up in an art world replete with stunted careers, bitterly disappointed halfwits and professores who have abandoned all hope, this is a glorious occasion for me. 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. The volume and variety of this work, today, is a little overwhelming. Reviewing Benjamin’s half-century of work for the first time is like stepping into Ali Baba’s cave or King Tut’s tomb. You want more time, and wish you had had more occasions over the years since the vast array speaks to us, in its refinement and complexity, of older, more rigorous, habits of production. 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---although not so strenuously as to undermine the exhibition that made their reputations.

Far from being Classicists, my favorites were all odd ducks and elegant urban gentlemen. John McLaughlin was always the cagy, elliptical Zen master, Hammersley, the subtle, genteel, and muscular wit, and 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 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 paths, deal with issues or aspire to a “look.” The narrative of Benjamin’s work spreads like a delta.

A variegated bouquet of visual opportunities are addressed, explored, set aside, and returned to when they interest him again. There are multiple situations to which he returns and departs at will. Some of Benjamin’s paintings speak to the moment of their creation. (There are wonderful 50’s paintings that evoke the populuxe curves and iconic modernity of that era.) There are other paintings that seem grounded in memory, in a recollection of missed exits or roads not taken. Some seem intended to respond to the challenge of other artist’s work. There are large grids and the small grids, wallpaper patterns and fields of irregularly conjoined triangles; there are stripes, horizontal and vertical, unfurling sequences of angled panels, and a whole array of signature elements that allude to designed objects, maps and stylized landscapes. Amidst this community of preferred formats there are singular objects, as well, that relate to nothing else. Throughout his career Benjamin has moved from one of these ongoing projects to the next as the mood strikes him with incidental one-of-a-kind inventions inserted for punctuation (this being the privilege of not having a dealer whispering in your ear).

All of Benjamin’s linear arrays become settings for chromatic invention. The array of lines in the rectangle comes first, and provides the occasion for color solutions, but, even so, 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 de-naturalize the browns, greens, grays and burgundies of the natural world with more acuity, usually by juxtaposing them with zinging violets and burning yellow-reds.

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. This is no small achievement and 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---expressed in a world of color so specified that I actually made a short tour through Benjamin’s oeuvre looking for standard stuff---for “paint-card” colors and “color wheel” hues. I found one orange triangle that looked pretty standard. That was it.

My point here is that, since the quality and quantity of Benjamin’s oeuvre has never been at issue, we must look elsewhere for explanations of his burgeoning vogue. The primary reason, I think, for the reconsideration of Benjamin and all of his brothers in arms has to be the rising tide of globalism and the gradual recession of New York City as a center of influence. The first consequence of this recession has been to remove New York School painting from the vortex, from its hegemonic position as the supreme pivot in the history of twentieth century art. One need only consider Abstract Expressionism, for just a moment, as just another style to see with a great deal of clarity that, 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 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 Vasarley 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.

As a consequence of this revised perspective, in the past five years there have been literally hundreds of exhibitions that address the new landscape that has revealed itself with the demotion of Abstract Expressionism. Geometric shows, Minimalist shows, Op shows, Hard Edge shows have been mounted all over the world. This is historicizing work that does what public museum should do. It reconsiders work that has fallen from fashion but not from intellectual esteem. The revival, of course, has also been driven by the sheer force attrition occasioned by a booming art market, but most prominently, I would suggest, the revival of interest in geometric abstraction from the past has been driven by a flourishing practice of geometric abstraction in the moment by young artists who have fallen back upon this work as a source of inspiration---as a starting point outside the hegemony of fashion. Citing my own experience I can attest to the fact that, in the mid nineteen nineties, I suddenly had students who kept scrapbooks of Polaroids of this work, who called collectors to visit works that were unavailable in public museums. Suddenly, artists in their seventies were receiving studio visits from artists in their twenties.

I must note here that, in my perception, this vogue among young artists was less a paradigm shift, than a reconsideration of just exactly how an artist should live. The possibility of stepping outside academia and the realm of public patronage and spending one’s time working in a studio became attractive again. As a consequence, something very special happened that is relatively unprecedented in the history of American art. Young artists began seeking not just mentors in the past, but colleagues. They perceived in the practice of geometric abstraction an incomplete project. So they wanted to see shows organized around the flourishing of geometric abstraction as an international language, but most of all, they wanted to show with these older artists. They want to hang their works in the same room with Benjamin, Hammersley, Riley, and Soto and text their chop. The result has been what I call “grandparental” exhibitions in which young and old artists with formal affinities exhibit together. I mounted a show of this sort myself, called Beau Monde, in Santa Fe, the critic David Pagel and painter Jim Hayward have also mounted a-historical shows of this sort in Claremont and Los Angeles. Others are springing up all over the world, in Buffalo, Cologne, Brussels, etc. Galleries now sport stables that include artists regardless of generation who share affinities. Good has replaced new in the lexicon of such exhibitions; nuance has replaced bombast; rigor has replaced nostalgia, and every artist, regardless of age, takes on all comers.

The closest analogy to this phenomenon I can imagine can be found in those rock concerts from the seventies, when Johnny Winter played with Muddy Waters and James Cotton, when Keith Richard played with Chuck Berry, and Eric Clapton played with B.B. King. These concerts, like these cross- generational exhibitions, generated a hot mixture of heart-felt homage and ruthless competition---the sort of thing, I hasten to note, that has been happening in American jazz for more than a century. Today it is happening in the arts and Karl Benjamin is both the beneficiary and the target of these aspirations. He should be confident on both counts, since he still mixes paint, and happy, as well, to participate in a genuinely new moment in the history of modern art, beyond parricide and zeitgeist, pedagogy and ideology, where artists are free to find their mentors where they find them with no fear of fashion or officialdom. Karl Benjamin’s gift to us in this moment is a brand, spanking new past that makes a new future possible.

Learn more about Karl Benjamin’s hard edge paintings and this exhibition here.