Altoon: Beyond the Aura - works of John Altoon

Art in America, Feb, 1999 by Leah Ollman

With his outsized personality and reckless intensity, John Altoon loomed large in the L.A. art scene of the '50s and '60s. Almost 30 years after his death, a survey exhibition afforded another look at this provocative artist.

John Altoon was one of the baddest of the bad boys who shaped the Los Angeles art scene of the 1950s and '60s. A swarthy, imposing figure, he boasted of riding his motorcycle at speeds over 100 mph, and of driving a car blindfolded. Diagnosed as schizophrenic in his late 30s, Altoon (1925-1969) suffered depression as well as paranoid episodes during which he destroyed much of his work and threatened to demolish that of others. He was "possessed by real demons," Larry Bell remembers.[1] Irving Blum, partner in the legendary Ferus Gallery, recalls: "If the gallery was closest in spirit to a single person, that person was John Altoon--dearly loved, defiant, romantic, highly ambitious--and slightly mad."[2] Altoon's struggle with mental illness, his big, dark, robust personality and his early death from a heart attack at 43 have, even more than his art itself, come to define his legacy.

A recent survey of Altoon's paintings, drawings and prints at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, did little to dispel this aura of romantic tragedy, or to make a more convincing case for Altoon's artistic legacy. Personal reminiscences largely set the tone in the accompanying catalogue, and the exhibition itself--co-curated by MCA director Hugh Davies and his assistant, Andrea Hales--functioned more as a sympathetic tribute than a critical reassessment. The show touched all the bases of Altoon's radically varied output methodically and democratically, but without the emphasis of judgment.

Like his peers in the Ferus group--Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses and others--Altoon started painting in an Abstract-Expressionist mode almost as a generational rite of passage. He orchestrated his large gestural paintings on the dynamic between tension and release. Fay's Christmas Painting (1958), a standout in the show, balances a tight matrix of agitated lines in green, red, orange and blue against a calmer, less articulated field of pale green. In his "Trip" series of 1959, wavering ribbons of color pulsate across the canvas like a fluttering quilt.

Altoon was more a "consolidator" than an innovator, as Davies writes in the catalogue's foreword, and he had ample exposure to the New York School during four years he spent in the city (1951-55) painting and working as a commercial illustrator. After a year-long sojourn in Spain and France, Altoon returned to his native Los Angeles, where the calligraphic thrust of his work, its internal scaffolding of webs and knots, integrated the influence of Philip Guston as well as that of Hassel Smith, a Bay Area Expressionist who appeared in the inaugural show at Ferus in 1957. Altoon's palette could get muddy and his schema musty, as several examples in the show attest, but many of the paintings remain fresh, their internal charge intact.

Stalwarts of the L.A. scene proceeded to clean up after "messy '50s painting," as Craig Kauffman put it,[3] paring down to the ephemeral essentials of transparency, light and space. Some, like Kienholz, pushed even further toward naked emotion and gritty, raw experience. Altoon followed a reductive path, shifting from an allover painted surface to discrete shapes floating within the open space of the white canvas, but the marks themselves remained relatively raw and rough-hewn. He exhibited consistently throughout the '60s, generally to good reviews, but the history of this fecund period in L.A. art can offer Altoon's work no better than a nebulous role.

Altoon's "Ocean Park" paintings of the early '60s signal the beginning of his use of semiautomatic imagery, a vocabulary of vaguely figurative, botanical and biological forms that he pursued until his death. In these elusive, often commanding paintings and in much of his subsequent work, Altoon practiced a sort of painterly assemblage, staging discontinuous ingatherings of forms in a rich palette of sunflower, crimson, morning glory and pale flesh. Lobes, flaps, tendrils, stems, shoots and bulbs hover in indeterminate space, appendages in search of a body. Some are obliquely sexual, others openly phallic. The work's cumulative energy--its "unkempt intensity," as one writer put it at the time[4]--derives from the animate quality of the shapes, their unfixed contours and their suggestions of growth and transmutation.

The tendril-and-bulb combination that recurs in Altoon's work evokes the early, overtly erotic imagery of Craig Kauffman, but Altoon's strongest affinity lies with Arshile Gorky. Altoon's biomorphic shapes, like Gorky's, align themselves within each painting or drawing according to an organic, internal logic, creating a visual current for the eye to ride, as fluid as the stream of consciousness. In a lyrical little gouache of 1961, a ridge of rust, dabbed with thick white fingerprints, shelters several smears the color of pumpkin. Comet trails of white and orange, a lipstick-red T, fragments of webs, sprouts and tendons create a rhythm of small continuities and large voids. Vigorous, shimmering passages occur frequently in Altoon's work, but only rarely, as in this painting, could he sustain that vibrancy from edge to edge.