Julian Beck at Ubu - New York - Brief Article

Actor, poet, activist, director--Julian Beck, who died in 1985, wore many hats. He was best known as a man of the stage, having founded the Living Theater with his wife, Judith Malina, in 1947, but he was also a productive and talented painter. After dropping out of Yale in 1943, Beck returned to his hometown of New York City to pursue poetry and painting. Two years later, his work was being shown at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, Art of This Century. During this time, Beck took up with a number of the Abstract Expressionists, including William Baziotes and Jackson Pollock. A prolific artist until 1958, when he decided to concentrate on theater, Beck painted more than 1,500 works, of which only a hundred paintings and a few hundred drawings are extant.

Beck's art reflected the influence of classic modernists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian as well as the Abstract Expressionists. At the same time, he was a self-taught, strongly independent painter who considered himself a primitive. Until the mid-1950s, his vocabulary remained nonobjective, consisting of strokes of color, calligraphic lines and an allover treatment of the picture plane. Then, in 1955, he began to incorporate collage, adding food labels, cigar bands, photographs and other materials culled from everyday life.

The 32 works in this exhibition, which was organized in association with Janos Gat Gallery, included four paintings on canvas, the rest being gouaches or drawings. An anarchic, joyous energy prevails in much of the work. Against a ground of yellow-orange edged in blue, the early small-scale gouache White Cracklings (1944) features thick black lines angled over groupings of mostly diagonal white marks. The result is a composition of considerable power. In a smaller untitled gouache and ink work from the same year, a black line meanders across the picture plane, curving and looping in a way that is reminiscent of Baziotes's style. Underneath, thinner lines bend and sway to their own purpose.

The later pieces reflect Beck's interest in mixed mediums. In a painting titled Lawrence Kornfeld (1958), after the one-time managing director of the Living Theater, a group photo of children at a summer camp is glued along the top of a canvas covered with a delicate field of pencil markings and bits of green and olive-brown oil paint. Beck's theater posters, such as one for a 1952 production of Alfred Jarry's Ubu the King and another for John Ashbery's The Heroes, are strong graphic exercises. This show made it clear that before he became a titan of avant-garde theater, Beck was a painter of force and poetic invention.

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