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Boston Globe
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Thornton Willis, who brought emotion to geometric painting, dies at 89
What he was painting — or, in a sense, defending — was a unique brand of geometric abstraction imbued with the energy, personality, and intense material focus of the midcentury New York School. Beginning with horizontal stripes and proceeding through zigzags, wedges, lattices, triangles, and crenelated shapes, often rendered on very large canvases, Mr. Willis spent a lifetime patiently excavating the problems and possibilities of the painted surface — in terms of color, texture, process and space. Advertisement His first well-known series, which he called 'Slat' paintings, was made on the floor with 4-inch paint rollers. For a few years in the 1970s, he gained widespread recognition and success with his wedges: upright, mesa-like shapes reminiscent of box-cutter blades. Then he dropped them in favor of overlapping lines and patterns of triangles that evoked isometric drawing. However the details evolved, his interest in creating balance and tension out of nothingness, in converting his own passing emotions into colors and brushstrokes, never wavered. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'In a sense, I've been painting the same painting since I started,' he suggested in the 2009 documentary short 'Portrait of an American Artist,' directed by Michael Feldman. 'It's like each painting is still sort of part of the painting before. It just seems somewhat impractical to work on the same actual canvas for an entire lifetime, and so you sort of move on — but each painting is kind of a segue into the next.' Advertisement Thornton Willis died June 15 in Manhattan. He was 89. His wife, painter Vered Lieb, said he died in a hospital from complications of COVID and pneumonia. An undated image of Mr. Willis. VIA THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA SARAH MOODY GALLERY OF ART/NYT Though Mr. Willis was deeply affected by the action and grit of painters such as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, he also took in such ostensibly contrary influences as Piet Mondrian and later hard-edge painters, resolving them all in canvases that balanced rich, organic brushwork against precisely organized, rigorously abstract composition. Often improvisatory but generally also with a touch of engineering about them, his paintings demanded sustained attention. From a certain distance, the arrangements of color and shape would seem to be the point, whether large or small, simple or complex. On closer view, those same thoughtful patterns dissolve into mere scaffolds for innumerable small decisions about the application of paint. In his 2014 painting 'Three Totems,' three vertical yellow bars nearly 6 feet tall float on a purple ground; four bars seem to overlap in an endless rectangle in 'Rashomon' (1986); and in 'A Painting for You,' made in 1988, irregular pieces dazzle in half a dozen colors. His own influence was both broad and substantial. Artists who visited his studio included painters Brice Marden and Sean Scully and sculptor Richard Serra. In a phone interview, painter James Little, a close friend, called him 'a major American painter' who 'punched above his weight and stayed there.' Painter Neil Jenney, in remarks at a memorial service, declared, 'With the passing of Thornton Willis, we say goodbye to the greatest abstract expressionist of them all.' Advertisement Mr. Willis's "Mass Driver," acrylic on canvas, 1987. THORNTON WILLIS, VIA THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA SARAH MOODY GALLERY OF ART/NYT Thornton Wilson Willis was born in Pensacola, Fla., on May 25, 1936, the elder of two sons of Edna Mae (Hall) Willis and Willard Willis, a Church of Christ minister. His family moved frequently around Florida and Alabama as his father took up posts in different congregations. His mother had a nervous breakdown and was eventually committed to a state institution. By high school he and his brother were back in Pensacola, living with their paternal grandparents. After serving in the Marine Corps for three years, Mr. Willis went to school on the GI Bill, eventually earning a bachelor's degree in painting from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1962. Though he had drawn well as a child and been keenly interested in the Sunday comics, his first exposure to the larger art world came in a college art appreciation class, which introduced him to Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso. While he was briefly enrolled as an architecture student at Auburn University, a show of work by students of Hans Hofmann came to campus and changed his life: Mr. Willis visited every day for a month. In 1964, he enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Alabama Tuscaloosa to study with painter Melville Price, who became a close friend and mentor. In a 2009 essay, Mr. Willis recalled marching 'hand in hand up Dexter Avenue' in Montgomery with Price and his wife during one of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1965 marches. In 1967, after teaching in Mississippi for a year, Mr. Willis moved to New York for a job at Wagner College on Staten Island. Advertisement 'Everybody went around saying, 'Painting's dead,'' he said in a 2022 interview, describing the atmosphere at this time. 'I said, 'OK, painting's dead.' And I got to New York, and it wasn't dead at all.' Soon he had found a loft in Chelsea, and then one on Spring Street in SoHo; had his first solo show, at Henri Gallery in Washington, D.C.; and quit teaching. In SoHo, he was immersed in a vibrant community: artists Alan Saret and Gordon Matta-Clark were his neighbors, and the graffiti-marked brick walls visible in the neighborhood's many vacant lots inspired him. In 1972, short on money, he accepted a job at Louisiana State University in New Orleans and left New York. When he returned, two years later, painter Stewart Hitch introduced him to Lieb, who was looking to sell a loft on Canal Street before leaving town herself. Instead, the two soon found a new place to share, with room for a studio, on Mercer Street. Mr. Willis remained there with Lieb for the rest of his life. In addition to Lieb, he leaves their daughter, Rachel Willis, and his son, David Willis, from his marriage to Peggy Whisenhant. His marriages to Whisenhant and Jane Miles ended in divorce. Beginning in 1979, Mr. Willis had a run of success. A well-received show at the cooperative gallery 55 Mercer led to interest from the Oscarsson Hood Gallery, which showed him through the 1980s. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979 and a painting fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980. Around 1982, Lieb said, something changed. 'He decided he couldn't do another wedge,' she recalled. 'I said, 'No, Thornton, we've been so broke, and we're finally getting some money!'' Advertisement But Mr. Willis didn't have it in him to make art that was anything but authentic self-expression. When critic James Panero asked in 'Portrait of an American Artist' what one could learn about Mr. Willis by looking at his paintings, he replied, 'That I'm an honest, straightforward person -- that I'm struggling to deal with what I feel is real, for me, in a confusing world.' This article originally appeared in
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Thornton Willis, Who Brought Emotion to Geometric Painting, Dies at 89
Like his paintings, Thornton Willis was unassuming but indomitable. Asked by an interviewer in 2019 how he had felt about movements, like Minimalism and Conceptualism, that threatened to replace his medium with newer approaches, Mr. Willis replied, 'I just kept painting,' before adding, with characteristic humor and modesty, 'So did a lot of other people, though.' What he was painting — or, in a sense, defending — was a unique brand of geometric abstraction imbued with the energy, personality and intense material focus of the midcentury New York School. Beginning with horizontal stripes and proceeding through zigzags, wedges, lattices, triangles and crenelated shapes, often rendered on very large canvases, Mr. Willis spent a lifetime patiently excavating the problems and possibilities of the painted surface — in terms of color, texture, process and space. His first well-known series, which he called 'Slat' paintings, was made on the floor with four-inch paint rollers. For a few years in the 1970s, he gained widespread recognition and success with his wedges — upright, mesa-like shapes reminiscent of box-cutter blades. Then he dropped them in favor of overlapping lines and patterns of triangles that evoked isometric drawing. However the details evolved, his interest in creating balance and tension out of nothingness, in converting his own passing emotions into colors and brushstrokes, never wavered. 'In a sense, I've been painting the same painting since I started,' he suggested in the 2009 documentary short 'Portrait of an American Artist,' directed by Michael Feldman. 'It's like each painting is still sort of part of the painting before. It just seems somewhat impractical to work on the same actual canvas for an entire lifetime, and so you sort of move on — but each painting is kind of a segue into the next.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Telegraph
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Is this the greatest memoirist of the 20th century?
When the artist Joe Brainard was in the midst of composing his fragmented memoir I Remember, in 1969, he wrote to a friend: 'I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel that I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written. I also feel that it is about everybody else as much as it is about me.' The grand claim was a good indicator of the book that was to come: ambitious yet playful, even childlike; self-disavowing as well as self-involved; perhaps, most of all, unabashedly honest. I Remember became Brainard's most celebrated written work. It is being reissued here in the UK by Daunt Books with a new introduction by Olivia Laing; in the US it has long been a cult favourite emblematising the 1960s New York School, of which Brainard was a key figure alongside poets Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. The book comprises a non-sequential list of distinct memories, each beginning with the words 'I remember'. These memories encompass things, people, moments in time, urban myths, products, celebrities and dreams. They range from the very brief – 'I remember pony tails', 'I remember liver' – to short paragraphs elaborating on anecdotes – 'I remember a story my mother telling of an old lady who had a china cabinet…' – or fantasies – 'I remember daydreams of a doctor who (on the sly) was experimenting with a drug that would turn you into a real stud.' At first their effect is disorienting immersion, but the fragments gradually become like coordinates. A mid-century American childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, comes into view, which modulates into adolescence and, occasionally, adulthood. As the memories hop between eras in Brainard's life, their grammar also sloshes between the past and the present, often with an evocative childishness, recording the way things can feel given or eternal: 'I remember chicken noodle soup when you are sick.' His list loops back to topics and repeats certain melodic phrasings. Its construction suggests both intuition and fine composition, and reminds you that Brainard was principally a painter and collage artist. I Remember sees the world in pieces, and these pieces themselves show a prevailing attraction to bits and details: 'little balls of ink', 'a blue glass mirror storefront in Tulsa with one piece missing.' Such fragments also propel the book's many sexual fantasies – 'I remember navels. Torso muscles. Hands. Arms with large veins.'; 'small areas of flesh', 'An orgy of fabric and flesh and friction (close-ups of details).' But Brainard's attraction to the glimpses and pieces that make up his book is not solely or simply erotic; not just a fetishisation of his own life. What carries the text is his sensitivity to the way that so much can be contained in the tiny and particular, and contrarily how whole worlds can be reduced to mnemonics. Memories are sometimes simply songs, sayings, or products, placed in Perspex-like quote marks: 'I remember 'The Tennessee Waltz.'', 'I remember 'Suave' hair cream.', 'I remember 'Queer as a three dollar bill.'' Brainard uses these quote marks artfully to suggest how a word or a thing is also a phenomenon: 'I remember a big Sunday lunch, a light Sunday night dinner, and in the morning – 'school.'' Among the songs and things and events – 'cinnamon toothpicks', 'shaking big hands' – runs a thread of negatives: memories of absences or lacks. 'I remember gift shops we didn't stop at,' Brainard writes. 'I remember not looking at crippled people.' 'I remember not allowing myself to start on the candy until the feature started.' And then there are Brainard's many frustrations, his unsuccessful efforts to imagine or understand things: 'I remember trying to realise how big the world is.' 'I remember trying to visualise my mother and father actually f------.' These kinds of absences, deprivations, and efforts shape us, informing our desires, imaginations, and senses of self. Brainard's form has the revelatory effect of showing how these absences can harden into potently present facts, sitting in our memory alongside what is real or realised, and becoming just as formative. Brainard hit on a brilliant device with his simple phrase. As the late Paul Auster observed in a reissue introduction in 2013, you can hardly read the book without having your own memories stirred. But Auster also notes that, despite having read the work several times, he finds it ironically hard to remember. It's true that while the form and certain memories are indelible, the way the book strikes you upon each reading is liable to change entirely. This is a function of Brainard's compacted form, which gives us only the memory, without interpretation, adornment, or association. Each is unburdened and capacious; as available to new meaning and feeling as one of the rocks Brainard remembers collecting, the ones 'you pick up and once inside wonder why.' It's a relentlessly specific time-capsule of a book, which bizarrely, movingly, seems to slip the confines of time.
Boston Globe
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Alice Notley, poet celebrated for ‘restless reinvention,' dies at 79
Ms. Notley took traditional forms of poetry such as villanelles and sonnets and laced them with experimental language that fluctuated between vernacular speech and dense lyricism. She also created pictorial poetry, or calligrams, in which she contorted words into fantastical shapes. In her 2020 collection, 'For the Ride,' one calligram took the form of a winged coyote. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'The signature of her work is a restless reinvention and a distrust of groupthink that remains true to her forebear's directive: to not give a damn,' David S. Wallace wrote in The New Yorker in 2020. Advertisement As Ms. Notley herself said in a 2010 essay, 'It's necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against ... everything.' She wrote without restraint, saying that she never edited or revised her work. And she largely shunned academia; poetry, she said in a 2009 interview with The Kenyon Review, 'should feel hugely uncomfortable in the academy.' Advertisement Though often identified as a key figure in the second generation of the New York School of poets -- alongside Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Ted Berrigan, who became her first husband -- Ms. Notley shirked the labels critics gave her: feminist, expatriate, avant-garde provocateur. 'Each of these labels sheds a little light on Notley's work, but it's the fact of their sheer number that's most illuminating,' the poet Joel Brouwer wrote of her 2007 collection, 'In the Pines,' in The New York Times Book Review. 'This is a poet who persistently exceeds, or eludes, the sum of her associations.' Padgett praised Ms. Notley for her 'vastness of mind.' 'Alice's main influence was herself and her interior life,' he said in an interview, 'and by interior life, I mean both her conscious waking thinking and her dream life, especially.' Ms. Notley realized early in her career that, as she wrote in a 2022 essay for the website Literary Hub, her 'dreaming self was better at some aspects of poetry writing than I, awake, was.' Her dreamlike style lent a 'sort of seer quality' to her poems, Waldman said in an interview. 'There's this traveling through realms,' she added. 'There's a great fluidity in her poetry, a lyric quality -- these different voices and modes -- and then there's magic: dreamlike connections where it shifts and suddenly you're somewhere else.' In the 1980s, several of Ms. Notley's loved ones died: her husband, Berrigan, in 1983 from complications of hepatitis; her stepdaughter, Kate Berrigan, in 1987 after she was struck by a motorcycle; and her brother Albert Notley, a Vietnam War veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, in 1988. Advertisement Ms. Notley said their voices had continued to speak to her, so she translated them into poetry. 'At Night the States,' written two years after Berrigan's death, reflects on the absence of a person: At night the states I forget them or I wish I was there in that one under the Stars. It smells like June in this night so sweet like air. I may have decided that the States are not that tired Or I have thought so. I have thought that. The poem 'Beginning With a Stain' is an elegy for her stepdaughter. And 'White Phosphorus,' one of her most acclaimed poems, was written for her brother: 'He said, 'I've come home; I've finally come home' then he died' 'flowers' 'Magnolias & lilies' 'innocent now' 'I've come home. Who's there? at home? all the dead?" 'To come home from the war' 'years after' 'To die' Albert Notley's death also influenced Alice Notley's best-known work, 'The Descent of Alette' (1992). Mired in grief, she began riding the subway in New York City. 'I would go from car to car and imagine these fantastic scenes,' she said last year in an interview with The Paris Review. 'I conceived of the subway as being this place that no one could leave.' In 'Alette,' a story evoking the descents into the underworld in Greek mythology, a female narrator, banished to the depths of the subway, must kill an all-powerful tyrant. She imagined 'Alette' as a feminine epic that sought to reclaim the form from men; in 2010 she called it 'an immense act of rebellion against dominant social forces.' Painter Rudy Burckhardt, a friend, called Ms. Notley 'our present-day Homer.' Advertisement Alice Elizabeth Notley was born Nov. 8, 1945, in Bisbee, Ariz., and spent most of her childhood in Needles, Calif., on the edge of the Mojave Desert, where her parents, Beulah (Oliver) and Albert Notley, ran an auto supply store. The Latin lessons she took in high school would later inform the prosody of her poems, as did folk and country songs. Her childhood was happy, 'but I was very impatient to grow up, and I wanted to leave Needles,' she told The Paris Review. 'I knew I had to, because I was going to become a weirdo.' She moved to New York to attend Barnard College in 1963. After graduating, she pursued a master's degree in fiction and poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she forged a close relationship with poet Anselm Hollo, who taught there, and met Berrigan. They married in 1972 and lived nomadically, keeping afloat through Berrigan's teaching jobs. They briefly stayed with painter Larry Rivers in the garage of his home in Southampton, N.Y. In Bolinas, Calif., in Marin County, they resided in what she called a 'chicken house' that belonged to writers Lewis and Phoebe MacAdams. Ms. Notley's early work, in the 1970s and '80s, centered on new motherhood -- her sons, Anselm and Edmund, were born in 1972 and 1974 -- and her writing was colored by the intermingling voices of her and her sons. 'Mommy what's this fork doing?/What?/It's being Donald Duck,' she wrote in her 1981 poem 'January.' 'Notley wrote extensively about pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing at a time when the poetry world was often inhospitable to women,' Wallace wrote in The New Yorker, adding that 'her influence for a later generation of poets exploring these same subjects is hard to overstate.' Advertisement In early-1970s Chicago, she edited Chicago, an important mimeographed magazine, and helped build the avant-garde scene there. In New York, she taught workshops to a generation of influential poets, including Eileen Myles, Bob Holman, and Patricia Spears Jones. Despite their prominence in the community, she and her husband struggled financially and lacked medical care; Berrigan's hepatitis went untreated. 'We had 20 dollars on the day Ted died,' Ms. Notley said. Throughout the 1980s, her poems grew longer and acquired more mythical tones. That trend continued in the 1990s, when she moved to Paris with poet Douglas Oliver, whom she married in 1988. They founded two literary magazines there, Gare du Nord and Scarlet. Oliver died in 2000. In addition to her sons, Ms. Notley leaves two sisters, Rebecca White and Margaret Notley, and two granddaughters. This article originally appeared in
