Chapter 8: New York and Transitions

Kauffman was undeniably a “serial romantic,” as one close friend said. He did not like living alone. Throughout his life he pursued one long-term relationship after another and enjoyed getting married (he did so six times). In late 1980, just a few months after his marriage ended, he met a painter named Lisa Adams at an art opening in downtown L.A. at the annex of what was then the L.A. Institute of Contemporary Art. They went for drinks at Al’s Bar, an artists hangout across the street, and Kauffman asked for her phone number. Adams was then twenty-four, Kauffman, forty-eight. After dating for ten months, they moved in together.

Still teaching at UCI, and once again ambivalent about living part-time in New York, Kauffman had nevertheless come to recognize the city’s importance in maintaining his career. So in early 1981 he bought the top floor loft at 33 Mercer Street; the Ronald Feldman Gallery was on the ground floor. Adams, who also had attended Scripps College before getting her MFA from Claremont Graduate School in 1980, agreed to go with him.

Kauffman still considered travel to be one of the great pleasures in life; through many years in his appointment books, the only word consistently written in all capital letters is “TRIP” — often with an exclamation mark. He drove fearlessly throughout Europe as well as across the United States. Though he did not keep extensive sketchbooks or photographs of these journeys, the impressions found their way into his paintings nonetheless. He and Adams managed to make four round trips by car in order to move from L.A. to New York, taking a different route each time to stop in remote towns and visit local restaurants and museums. “The bayous of Louisiana, the towns in Appalachia, we drove through the US looking at different oddities, which was a preoccupation of Craig’s,” recalled Adams.166 After driving northern, southern, and midwestern routes, they even traveled through Canada.

In September 1981 Kauffman and Adams moved into the Mercer Street loft and started to set up their studios. It was a time of great change in the New York art scene. After a decade of Minimal, Post-Minimal and Conceptual Art, a new generation of artists, such as Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl, had brought about a return of interest in painting, especially gestural and figurative painting.

Kauffman now retained the architectural structure of the Silk Paintings but started rendering the forms in a loose-wristed, expressive manner. Tell Tale Heart v. 3 (1980) returns to the throbbing center of his early, highly praised painting shown at Ferus in 1958. Now using paint stick, tempera, and acrylic on silk, he deployed variants of red, yellow, and blue in the stylized depiction of a long leg ending in a high-heeled shoe, with a narrow heart that could be seen as a vulva.

The painting was featured on the cover of the catalog for the exhibition Craig Kauffman: A Comprehensive Survey 1957–1980 (March 14–May 3, 1981), organized by Robert McDonald, at that time chief curator of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.167 The show was momentous, a retrospective of all his work to date: the 1950s abstract oils, the 1960s vacuum-formed wall reliefs, the 1970s paintings constructed of wood frames or delicately composed on silk. Confronted with so much work from the past, Kauffman found the process of readying the show difficult and became irritable. Before the opening, he demanded that the curator remove a large work by Frank Stella that was hanging in the atrium.

With forty-two pieces, the show included more works in plastic than paintings and brought out many of the early collectors and supporters of such work. Adams recalled that Kauffman was “extremely uncomfortable” and drank excessively at the opening. Kauffman did not regret his decision to curtail the plastic work that had brought him so much fame and fortune, but undoubtedly felt conflicted. According to Adams, he felt that he had made the right move in terms of his own creative sensibilities, but wondered if his new work — which he genuinely enjoyed — would ever earn the same critical acclaim.

A few months later, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties (July 21–October 4, 1981). LACMA curator Maurice Tuchman included six of Kauffman's acrylic plastic Bubbles from 1967 and 1968, along with works by Irwin, Bengston, Moses, and other friends. More than a decade had passed since the reign of Ferus Gallery, where many of these artists had originally shown. A young critic named Christopher Knight had a fresh take on the work. In a catalog essay, he questioned earlier readings of the “L.A. Look,” saying they often belied “the quiet lyricism of much of the work." This lyricism, as he continued,

could be described as an almost transcendent approach toward the perfection of the object. This obsessively perfectionist approach, however, does not mean that materials and techniques are the subject of the art. Rather, it reveals an attitude towards making art that is charged with an idealism concerning the object.

Knight's observations conveyed the depth of commitment that Kauffman had not only brought to his work in plastic but also felt for his painting.

However, the Los Angeles art scene was in the process of exponential change. Ferus, the most highly regarded gallery on La Cienega Boulevard in the 1960s, had closed in 1966. The "L.A. Look," as critics characterized the pristine finishes and Pop color used by many Ferus artists, had been replaced by a more diverse, politicized, and populous art scene. Conceptual art, especially, took hold. At California Institute of the Arts, which began offering classes on its suburban Valencia campus in 1971, both the art department faculty and the students took a rigorously interrogatory approach to the history and practice of art. Teachers like John Baldessari and students like Mike Kelley and Lari Pittman were not interested in pursuing aesthetic ideas associated with the Ferus group.  
 
Kauffman himself was deeply ambivalent about the wave of praise he was receiving for work that he was no longer interested in pursuing. He was in the midst of studying Matisse and Paul Cézanne, and went with Adams several times to see their paintings at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. The goldfish and flowers of Matisse found their way into Kauffman's own compositions that still employed the interior of the studio as a method of structuring space. He was struggling as well with developments in the Manhattan art world, where Neo-Expressionism was in vogue. He was trying to respond to the bright, gestural painting of younger artists. According to Adams, he used a fat round brush loaded with paint in 1981 and 1982, and his compositions grew increasingly complicated, even chaotic, as he tried to acquire a greater spontaneity. To escape his overweening sense of control, he was drinking and often had fights with friends and colleagues. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he had been a heavy drinker, but the permissive partying atmosphere of the early 1980s accelerated his intake. In 1983 he entered a rehab program and was able to stop drinking.

After a month in treatment, Kauffman and Adams drove to Hope, Idaho, to spend the month of August with Ed and Nancy Reddin Kienholz. The Kienholzes had founded the Faith and Charity in Hope Gallery there, and regularly offered shows to their friends. They created one for Kauffman: a tiny survey that included what Kienholz deemed Kauffman's “beautifully painted” 1956 brushy portraits of women, abstract paintings with wood stretcher bars on front and back, Silk Paintings, and a new painting of a ladder-back rocking chair against a gridded background. In a small catalog essay, Kienholz wrote that Kauffman had the "ability to paint as though the light source were coming from the canvas through the subject matter." Of the recent work, he wrote, "The subject matter now is most often that of a flattened abstract rattan chair with light coming through the latticed seat portion from behind."

Kienholz's description made reference to a recent discovery of Kauffman's: with Adams, he had traveled to the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to see examples of the Shakers’ spare, handmade furniture. Kauffman bought kits so he could assemble Shaker chairs and stools himself. As Adams recalled, “All had those woven seats that Craig loved so much … so simple, so beautiful, like a Westerner’s answer to Zen design.”

In fact, these ladder-back chairs and tall stools dominated Kauffman's 1983 paintings. Many were drawn in black paint over flat fields of the colors one associates with barns and farm equipment: rusty reds, mossy greens, and muted yellows, as can be seen in Green and Red Chairs. Poetic in their humble simplicity, they were representational as an image and an idea simultaneously, not unlike the New Image painting that was showing up in the New York galleries and museums around that time, which Kauffman was well aware of. New Image Painting, a 1978 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, included artists as diverse as Jennifer Bartlett, Susan Rothenberg, and Philip Guston, and led to a wave of stylized, expressive figurative painting.

That fall Kauffman and Adams visited his old friend Allen Lynch, who had become a Zen master and left New York City for Asheville, North Carolina. Lynch had installed a dojo on the top floor of his Victorian house and in other rooms had created a spare, museumlike environment for his collection of rare eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese ceramics, particularly raku ware. Kauffman, who had bought a number of tea ceremony bowls and other objects from Lynch over the years, was deeply moved upon seeing the collection — carefully encased in protective vitrines — in its entirety. Kauffman had continued his study of martial arts, attained a brown belt in judo, and, newly sober, had started to meditate. Now Lynch encouraged him to pursue zazen meditation and recommended books like Religion and Nothingness, by Keiji Nishitani, which Lynch found “the most illuminating book I have ever read on Buddhism.”

In Kauffman’s paintings of 1984 and 1985, highly stylized, outlined objects such as Japanese tea bowls and trays of sushi were positioned on flat, undifferentiated backgrounds. Images were apportioned in asymmetrical arrangements in keeping with the Japanese aesthetic. The new work would be shown at Fuller Goldeen Gallery in San Francisco from March 5 to 30, 1985, and at Asher Faure Gallery in L.A. from September 7 to October 5. Earlier work was included in the 1985 USC exhibition Sunshine and Shadow: Recent Paintings in Southern California at the Fisher Gallery. In her catalog essay, curator Susan Larsen described Kauffman's use of silk, paper, and translucent paint:

They function pictorially and not merely as beautiful, tactile materials. He draws with them, defines edges with them, exploits their light-giving properties, to establish a uniquely radiant surface plane and a taut, inward-pressing edge.

But other, more Western elements were coming to bear on Kauffman's work. By the end of 1984 and early 1985, objects such as an ashtray bearing a smoking cigarette, candles in holders, or a light bulb hanging from a cord, were also appearing. These are especially notable given Kauffman’s ongoing interest in the source and quality of light. More disturbing was the recurrent image of the floating, disembodied head of Adams. In a provocative painting from the period, Vivian–Lisa–Robot, Sushi, Kauffman rendered the head of a robot in a way that was indistinguishable from the heads of his second wife and his lover. Adams, twenty-four years younger than Kauffman and feeling confined in their relationship, had left him in October 1984. Bitterness ensued for a frustrated Kauffman.

By 1985 Kauffman had been married four times and had lived with Adams for four years. He chose independent and intelligent women as partners, but their pursuit of their own careers and desires often set them at odds with him. The separation from Adams led him to reconsider what he wanted from a relationship.

[Editor's Note: Coming soon, our Art Drop Editions will present a new, limited edition print by Lisa Adams. Her generosity has made the art affordable to most folks and new collectors. I believe the image is the most relevant piece of art, to our time and to our nation, that I have seen in quite awhile. Please keep your eye on our site Art Report Today. ~ Gordy Grundy]

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is a prolific SoCal-based arts writer with an extensive list of accomplishments. Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe is considered the most definitive biography of the artist. Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s is a classic must read. Today, she writes for Wallpaper*, Alta and posts a lot at @HunterDPhilp

Sensual Mechanical: The Art of Craig Kauffman
Published by Frank Lloyd Gallery, 2012
Courtesy the Estate of Craig Kauffman

A special thanks to Frank Lloyd!

Photos:
1) Craig Kauffman and Lisa Adams in Hope, Idaho, 1983
2) Lisa’s Leap Beyond Logic, 1979–1985, acrylic and oil on silk on canvas, 97 × 60 inches, collection of the Estate of Craig Kauffman

The Website of Lisa Adams, Click Here

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