Abstract compounds - abstract expressionist Emerson Woelffer

Art in America, March, 1993 by Michael Duncan

A West Coast artist with roots in Abstract Expressionism, Emerson Woelffer has for 50 years explored ever new ways of combining formal structure and gestural impulse.

The bombastic scale and relentless machismo of the Abstract expressionists seem completely out of step with today's scaled-down, antiheroic art world. Yet those formal and conceptual innovators clearly paved the way for contemporary abstract artists. Therefore it seems the right moment to consider the work of a more modest practitioner belonging to that movement, Emerson Woelffer, who has been left out of the history books despite an ongoing 50-year career that has won him praise from such big guns as de Kooning, Rothko and Motherwell. A worthy member of the New York School, Woelffer just happened to live 3,000 miles out of town. In Los Angeles this winter three concurrent shows honored Woelffer on his retirement after 30 years of teaching; his students have included Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Joe Goode and Roy Dowell. The first full retrospective of Woelffer's works on paper dating from 1940 to 1992 was held at the Otis School of Art and Design, where he headed the painting department. Augmenting this show were joint exhibitions of Woelffer's paintings, ranging in date from 1947 to 1977, at the Manny Silverman and James Corcoran galleries.

Woelffer's background is a chronicle of high-powered influences: from teaching under Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1942 and under Buckminister Fuller at Black Mountain College in 1949 to working with Motherwell at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in 1954. During the late '40s Woelffer spent an important period in the Yucatan, where he began his lifelong fascination with pre-Columbian and tribal art. In 1957-58 he passed a formative 16 months working in a tiny fishing village on the island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples. There he developed the simplified approach to abstraction that became his trademark style. Using a palette of muted Mediterranean off-greens and ochers, he began to employ isolated brushstrokes on flat fields of color, with all the elements juxtaposed for contrasting effects.

Without the ponderous spirituality of works by Newman or Rothko or the grandiosity of Motherwell's canvases, Woelffer's art explores the formal possibilities of Abstract Expressionism with vivacity, variation and clarity. Never inflated, Woelffer's paintings carefully balance impulse and craft, spontaneity and restraint. Unlike other '50s artists who eventually abandoned a gestural style (such as Tworkov), Woelffer has never lost faith in the automatist instinct. He has repeatedly stated, "I always work first and think later." Yet his fine-honed esthetic sensibility and the precision of his effects have consistently fed his art with "right" inspired moments. In 1977 Motherwell observed that Woelffer's lasting loyalty to the principles of Abstract Expressionism reflected a "depth of culture along with painterly instincts that made no other choice viable for him."

The show at Silverman included a few early totenic and pictographic paintings from the late '40s that reveal Woelffer's roots in the imagery of Picasso and Surrealsm. Here his brushstroke seems inhibited by the attention to figural composition; in his soft strokes and brash use of color Woelffer seems eager to clear away the complex totemic figures. In the early '50s he turned to simple geometric symbols, letters and numerals, executed in bold lines and scattered across a variously colored canvas. A jazz aficionado, Woelffer sought a loose rhythm of musical improvisation in the repeated numbers, Xs and Os that still occasionally pop up in his work.

Both the Silverman and Corcoran shows focused on the Ischia paintings of the late '50s, in which Woelffer refined his ideas regarding flatness and the resolution of two-dimensional space. Like Gottheb's contemporaneous "Bursts" of 1957, which also grew out of earlier pictographic grids, this group of paintings showed Woelffer simplifying his ideas and developing a signature format. Every element of these works is framed: fields of color, calligraphy, single brushstrokes. The occasional appearance of his scrawled signature, the letter "W" or a place-name ("Roma," "Forio d'Ischia") adds a referential resonance to his compositions. Yet this layering of marks never yields a sense of spatial illusion; all of Woelffer's works insist on their two-dimensionality.

In Roma (1958), scrawled white graffiti wanders over three thick black brushstrokes that evoke architectural columns on an earthy brown background. In an interview with Roy Dowen in the Otis catalogue, Woelffer recalled that on Ischia, the large Italian families who lived near him seemed continuously to be in mourning, to the extent that his visit there was visually dominated by the color black. Rich, luscious black appears in the Ischia paintings as a heavy accent: marking compositional sections, suggesting architecture, contrasting with the dry, sun-faded blues, greens and browns. In September Painting #9 (1960) at Corcoran, a dense black rectangle serves as a field on which splattered, crewn-colored strokes stand at attention, proud of their intense, deliberate application. The artist's gestures are recorded on this blackboard as a kind of evidence, a loaded assertion of being.