Autumnal, Eternal: A Reminiscence of Four Northern California Painters, 1992-2020

By Paul Reidinger

An American writer recalls his interlaced friendships with four Northern California painters at the turn of the millennium and beyond. The painters were Paul Wonner and Bill (William Theophilus) Brown, both of whom were associated with the Bay Area figurative movement of the 1950s, along with Jack Freeman of San Francisco and Sachal (Alexander Lioutikoff), born in Kiev and once renowned by the San Francisco Chronicle as "the Michelangelo of Highway 101."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Reidinger
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463621783

Paul Reidinger

Paul Reidinger is the author of several novels, including The Best Man, Good Boys, The City Kid, and The Bad American. His other books include a memoir, Lions in the Garden, a collection of essays and criticism Patchwork, and The Federalist Regained, an essay on the Constitution. He grew up in Wisconsin, was educated at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and lives in San Francisco.

Book preview

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue: Exeunt

About the Author

Introduction

Because painters paint rather than write, generally speaking, and because writers sometimes come to know painters, it will fall to the occasional writer to write about painters. He does so as a gesture of love, an act of homage and, not least, a bequest to posterity.

He does so because he believes his subjects to be interesting and worthy and because he recognizes that words are not the painter’s natural medium and yet are the principal human means of examining and understanding any subject. Words carry the past into the future. Words are the medium of intellect – of history and biography, of cultural memory. They are the means by which yesterday speaks to tomorrow. They mark the route, the road ahead.

Painters might not deal in words, but, if they are lucky, they will be described in and accounted for with words. They will be made immortal, in part, by words. We know and remember painters by their painted works but also by what we read about them. And it matters who writes what we read. It matters, for instance, that the writer has personally known those he is writing about.

By some chance – I guess by pure chance – I came to know some painters in the San Francisco Bay Area over the years, four painters in particular. I became friends with them and I loved them. I admired them and found them fascinating in their differences – their differences both from me, who had an entirely different sort of mind and destiny, and from one another.

Despite all those differences, these painters did share some basic characteristics. All of them were much older than I was, a full generation or more. All were men, a fact that might be seen as constricting if not outright sexist but, for better or worse, was highly relevant to the way I knew them and saw their work. They were all also what we now freely call white, which was not at all relevant to how I knew them and saw their work.

All the painters came to northern California from somewhere else, some faraway place. All of them thus had taken root in some other cultural soil before transplanting themselves to the San Francisco Bay Area. None were natives to northern California, and thus they were free of that region’s strong nativism.

Because I too was an immigrant – because I too had been born and raised in one environment before migrating to another – I shared with all these painters the identity of the immigrant or the transplant, the person who feels he is both inside and outside the place he ends up living. He is neither native nor sojourner. He is a resident alien.

Such a transplant is, or at least is likely to be, intrepid and an entrepeneur of sorts. He is an agent of cross-cultural pollination. He has left an old place – where he might have staked a native’s claim – and journeyed to a new one to start afresh. In doing so, he has brought with him the memories of another life in another land while seeing his new land with clear eyes.

Maybe you have to be from somewhere else and come in to some new place in order to really see it, one of my painters, Paul Wonner, told the interviewer Daphne Lane Beneke in August 1994.

The immigrant painter, with his fresh vision, mingles the near and the far, the old and the new, the familiar and the unfamiliar. He takes much less for granted. He offers and wields perspective. A painter needs perspective – needs a perspective, his own perspective. He needs a way of seeing. Each of the great ones finds his own way of seeing.

•••

My own aspirations in life did not include becoming a painter. My mother bought me an easel for one of my earliest birthdays, before kindergarten, and she put me in some kind of drawing class, possibly hoping that I would follow in the steps of her maternal grandmother, who died the year I was born -- but it was not to be. I was not fated to be a painter, just as I was not fated to be a concert pianist despite the several years’ worth of piano lessons I took on the eve of adolescence, or a judge, despite much encouragement and high maternal hopes.

Perhaps, much later in life, that very lack of painterly aspiration made me somehow attractive to painters with whom I crossed paths. I was not native to their world; I was merely a caller and observer. I was an outlander and thus an oddity, perhaps an interesting or amusing one from time to time, but never a rival or threat. I was not a competitor or a judge. I was a receptive and admiring audience and, perhaps, a conduit to the world of words.

Competitiveness, or lack of it, is an important consideration in the social mechanics of culture-making. The complexly enfolded worlds of painters, musicians, writers and other artists tend to be rife with ego and vanity. The thin skins of creators are brittle and yet bruise easily, like the rinds of some strange fruit.

The absence of a competitive edge, on the other hand, means that people can be relaxed and natural with one another. They can even be sympathetic. There is no criticism, there is no anxious comparison, there is no envy or defensiveness. Inquiry is genuine and friendly, not adversarial and strategic.

Over the years, I listened to the painters and learned from them and thought about whether what they did and how they did it might have any bearing on what I was hoping and trying to do. I was a student, in a sense, a visiting scholar. I was harmless and yet quite supportive in my harmlessness. I liked them all as people, and therefore I was predisposed to like their painting, and I was willing to say so. If I didn’t like something, I would just nod and move on to something I did like, which seldom took long.

At some point it occurred to me that each of the painters, each in his own way, was entrusting me with aspects of his story. I had come to know each of them personally. I knew what they were like. My experience of them was direct. I knew the sounds of their voices. I knew how the muscles of their faces worked when they talked and laughed. I knew what made them laugh. I knew what kind of clothes they wore. I knew what they did and didn’t to eat. I came to recognize their handwriting. I knew them as people.

We don’t necessarily want to know that artists are people, people just like everybody else, or almost. We want them to be different. We need them to be different, at least once they’re dead. Once they’ve died, we can elevate them to the status of demigods, mysterious beings whose powers of creativity can be marveled at but not understood. Demigods keep secrets they do not reveal to mere mortals. And gods of some kind seem to be necessary to our kind even in, or especially in, a post-religious, technocratic age when the death of God is no longer even old news but what physics students know as a universal constant, a given, so obvious that it’s not worth discussing.

•••

That artists are strange, marvelous demigods who live at a remove from the ordinary run of humanity is the romantic view. The opposite, if not realistic, view is that artists are demonic, overgrown children who drink too much and scream too loudly and die too young. They flare hot, bright and fast, like Fourth of July sparklers. They flash, flicker and burn out. They dazzle briefly before collapsing into heaps of cold ash. We must be alert to their presence and swift to benefit from it, in this view, because they won’t last long.

My own view, which I would describe as cautiously realistic, is different from either of these romantic views and is substantially tempered by the related problems of recognition and reputation. It is widely assumed in our populist culture – so widely assumed, in fact, that the assumption is invisible – that popularity indicates worth and that the Zeitgeist, in its panoptic wisdom, misses nothing and is never wrong.

If you are worthy, then you are, or soon will be, recognized and become famous. Everyone will approve of you, since (in an odd twist of post-Christian American Calvinism) fame correlates with worthiness. It is a sign of God’s favor, though of course there is no God. If you are famous, you must be worthy, or you would not be famous. If you are not famous, then you cannot be worthy, because if you were worthy you would be famous. This is an iron law of our populist culture. It has a neat architecture that can easily be mistaken for logic or even justice.

None of the painters I consider here could be considered famous, not in the sense, and in an age, of Lady Gaga. You would not find them on the cover, or mentioned in the pages, of People magazine. You would not see them interviewed on television, nor would you be following them on Twitter. They would not have 189,773 Likes in response to a Facebook status update they posted twenty minutes ago.

Two of the four, Paul Wonner and Bill (William Theophilus) Brown, spent virtually all their professional lives being associated with the Bay Area figurative movement of the 1950s, and perhaps for that reason, they did become known to a degree. The Bay Area figurative movement had a rather large name at its head, that of Richard Diebenkorn, and because the media, for ease of labeling, likes such notions as movements, schools and similar groupings, and because, in a media culture, fame and reputation are largely functions of media attention, Diebenkorn’s considerable fame did spread to those around him.

If, on the other hand, you are not a member of a school or movement recognized by the media, the media will not rush to recognize you, and you may well have trouble being seen to exist at all. The other two painters I ponder here, Alexander Sachal and Jack Freeman, answer to this description. Each had deep roots in established traditions, each became a master in his own right, but each also seemed to lack a link or connection to an existing stream of fame and media attention that, for better or worse, might have irrigated the fields in which they toiled.

Sacha’s professional position was perhaps the most unusual of the four. He was the only European among them and remained a European all his life. He had a European identity, and European identities run deep, beyond the ken of Americans. At a party in a barn, he once marveled to me how shallow was the conversation among American men, the only permissible subjects for discussion being money, real estate and sports. Russian men, he said – he was Russian, or really Ukrainian – liked to gather and talk about the meaning of life while drinking vodka. Sacha liked to have a shot or two of vodka at the outset of any social gathering. He certainly liked to talk about the meaning of life. He was like a character sprung to life from the pages of a Tolstoy novel.

The deep European cultural root sustained him against American neglect and incomprehension. It was never my impression that he sought public attention or placed much value on it. He understood his own worth; he knew where he stood in the scheme of things, even if the Americans around him had no idea. He stood outside the narcotic fog of American exceptionalism.

Jack Freeman, on the other hand, was an American through and through. He was a decade or more younger than the other three and had been in his twenties during the convulsive 1960s in the United States. He was a true child of the ‘60s, a bohemian and peacenik hostile to American commercial and military culture.

But he was a child, too, of the modern media, as the other three were not. He used a personal computer and was a prolific emailer, as they were not. He had the modern American’s visceral understanding of the importance of media attention and of our sprinting gadgetry. Of my four painters, he was probably the most sensitive to neglect, and he was surely the most neglected of them.

•••

It is something of a truism – and a mass exercise in self-congratulation, really – that no talent goes undiscovered. There are no great minds or great painters from earlier times who failed to attract notice, we are reassured, no Mozarts or Galileos who somehow slipped the net of popular awareness. Everyone worthy of being noticed is now present and accounted for. The cultural commissariat misses nothing and makes no mistakes. Ignorance, arrogance, sloth, pettiness and sheer stupidity cannot possibly be involved. There might have been a brief blip in rare cases – that of Vincent van Gogh springs to mind – but eventually justice is done.

As a younger person I might have believed all this and probably did, but I have now lived long enough, and seen enough, to know otherwise. Many, many reputations, good and bad, grand and minuscule, are undeserved. Reputation brokerage is a form of power brokerage, and power brokerage is concerned first and foremost with perpetuating itself. That is the nature of power. Merit and worth are cover stories, stirring notions that clothe unseen and often unlovely agendas.

I believe there are underappreciated and even undiscovered masters in art, and I believe this because I’ve known some of them. I know their unknown mastery to be a fact. I take it as my responsibility to write about a few of these underappreciated or unknown masters, to do what is in my small power to call attention to their work and worth.

In writing this little reminiscence, I am trying, in a sense, to write the memoirs they would never have written – and in fact did not write -- themselves. I testify to posterity on their behalf and am honored that I have the chance to do so.

1.

Painterly legend tells that Matisse and Picasso – frenemies long before the term existed – once agreed to exchange paintings. Matisse duly called at Picasso’s studio in the south of France and, after examining the inventory, carried off several of the best works.

Not long after, a slightly miffed but wily Picasso paid his reciprocal visit to Matisse’s studio (also in the south of France) and, after his own careful examination, took away several of the worst ones. These he then displayed in his own studio. When visitors asked Picasso about the paintings, he would say, Oh, that’s some of Matisse’s recent work.

Bill Brown loved to tell that story, and he would always burst into gravelly laughter at the end of it. His grayish-blue eyes would twinkle with mischievous delight. Bill loved a good story and loved to tell a good story, he had a lot of good stories to tell, and he told them well. He was a master storyteller, a true raconteur. He particularly loved stories about Picasso, whom he had known and found amusing, and I think he loved the Matisse-swap story most of all because of its elegant maliciousness and its themes of rivalry and revenge. Bill loved a bit of mischief.

Rivalry and competitiveness among painters are far from unknown. Painters can be prickly and sensitive, especially when among their own kind, and so trying to gather them up for social events, as Steve and I spent years doing, might be seen as a fool’s errand. I sometimes saw it that way, even as we kept on trying to bring together the ever-growing roster of painters we knew. Timing was always an issue; time itself was an issue, since all the painters were elderly, and at one point death did intervene, permanently disrupting the plan.

This book’s quartet of painters exists for me now only in memory, which is the only place it could ever have existed. The story has become whole for me only in retrospect. We did not quite know the four painters simultaneously; their lives, though long, did not perfectly overlap. It was never going to be possible for us to get all four of them together under the same roof.

But we kept orchestrating parties and dinners anyway, some small and others less so, some under our roof, some under others’ roofs and some under no roof at all, in our pursuit of some kind of whole.

•••

On Labor Day 2002 – one of those immaculate, golden-green days that late summer brings in abundance to the San Francisco Bay Area – we threw open the French doors at the back of the house and, for the first time ever, lugged the dining-room table onto the brick terrace in the garden in preparation for a little party of painters.

The table was a knock-off of a knock-off of a nineteenth-century Norman farm table. We’d had it made in Chicago years before and brought it with us to California in 1991. We loved it and had had it refinished in 1996, but it was an inside cat, not an outside cat. It had never been outside, and Steve, at least, had doubts that it ever should be.

But now, for a brief shining moment, it was outside. We hadn’t crashed into or wrecked anything in moving it, and under an open patio umbrella and set with some of our best tableware (Wedgwood bone china in the Mistral pattern), it looked quite at home and quite welcoming on the terrace. (The Wedgwood, too, had theretofore been exclusively indoor kit – but, with its floral trim of yellow and blue, it seemed to be made for a garden party at the end of summer.)

Everything, in fact, looked as if it had always been there. My only worry was that, once the merriment had ended and the guests had gone, leaving in their wake any number of empty wine bottles, we were going to have to lug the heavy table back inside, through the difficult L-turn at the edge of the balcony, through the study, the kitchen and two rather narrow doorways before resettling it in the dining room. We would be tired and in a hurry and, perhaps, not quite clear in the head. If you were not fit to drive,