EMERSON WOELFFER: A SOLO FLIGHT
Ed Ruscha [Curator]
Ed Ruscha [Curator]: EMERSON WOELFFER: A SOLO FLIGHT. Los Angeles: REDCAT/California Institute of the Arts, 2003. First edition. Slim quarto. Photo illustrated printed wrappers. Printed vellum frontis. 64 pp. One fold-out. 34 color plates. 32 black and white text illustrations. Exhibition catalog with color plates, exhibition history, bibliography, and chronology. Wrappers lightly handled, but a fine, fresh copy. Rare.
8.5 x 11 softcover exhibition catalog with 64 pages dedicated to the life and art of Emerson Woelffer. Curated by Ed Ruscha, the exhibition and catalog features testimonials and remembrances by Joe Goode, Daniel La Rue Johnson, Terry Allen, Nob Hadeishi, Raul Guerrero, Thomas Ryan, Ray Dowell, Charles Arnoldi, Llyn Foulkes, Jerry McMillan, George Herms, Mary Corse, Allen Ruppersberg, Laddie John Dill, Gary Wong, Billy Copley, Ed Bereal, Larry Bell, Boyd Elder, Dennis Hopper, Patrick Blackwell, and Ynez Johnston.
Emerson Woelffer taught at CalArts (then called Chouinard) and Otis, and was a deeply influential instructor to students including Llyn Foulkes, Larry Bell, and Ed Ruscha; at the time of Woelffer’s death, Ruscha curated a show of his works at REDCAT. Before moving to Los Angeles, Woelffer taught at the New Bauhaus with Moholy-Nagy, and also at Black Mountain College.
Emerson Woelffer (Chicago, 1914 – 2003) studied academic painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, and immediately afterwards got a job as an easel painter for the Works Progress Administration. Woelffer next served in World War II, and in 1942, upon his return, was hired by László Moholy-Nagy to teach fine art at the New Bauhaus at the Institute of Design in Chicago. Woelffer and Moholy-Nagy spent the next eight years teaching alongside each other—they even shared a studio space. When Surrealist painter Roberto Matta gave a talk at the New Bauhaus about Automatism—the practice of letting one’s subconscious direct his work—Woelffer was deeply affected, and began to experiment with non-objective painting in the studio. Both Kandinsky’s and Mondrian’s ideas became very influential for Woellfer; he eventually began calling himself a Surrealist Expressionist. Woelffer was already a great admirer of jazz and its techniques of musical improvisation, and was himself a jazz drummer, so Automatism allowed him to transition a naturalness into his painting technique as well. The intuitive gesture—the gesture directed by something beyond oneself—became central to Woelffer’s work. He later said, “I think my stuff is very spiritual. Some people can put spirituality into words. I do it with a stick of wood with pig hair on the end and some paint.”
Eventually, Buckminster Fuller invited Woelffer to teach at Black Mountain College, and Woelffer left the New Bauhaus to do so. Soon after, Woelffer had a show at Artists Gallery in New York, but rather than stay in New York and become a permanent part of the movement there, Woelffer left to live abroad for a decade—first in the Yucatán, and then in Naples, Italy. New York never felt like a fit for Woelffer; he greatly preferred the inspiration he derived from the indigenous art he observed while abroad, works which he felt were—like his own art—intuitively directed, whereas the New York art scene was about the idea.
Woelffer returned to the states to teach art at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, where he worked alongside Robert Motherwell, and the two men became lifelong friends. Woelffer began using symbols in his work—numbers and birds marked in gesturally and repeated across many paintings. In 1959, Woelffer relocated to Los Angeles so he could teach at CalArts, then called Chouinard. From then on, Woelffer was based in Los Angeles—he later headed the painting department at Otis—and was a hugely influential teacher to a generation of Los Angeles artists. This period—the start of Woelffer’s time in Los Angeles—was an important one for the artist; he had a solo show at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1962, and in 1964, was included in the hugely influential Clement Greenberg-curated show at LACMA, Post-Painterly Abstraction. Woelffer liked living in Los Angeles because he felt it was acceptable to be making spiritual art there, whereas in New York it was not. His house in Mt. Washington was filled with his collection of African art, as well as works by friends like Motherwell.
Woelffer’s paintings from this period began using invented symbolism, motifs such as handprints, flag-like stripes, and a shape he called a “mirror”—two convex curves reflecting across a central axis. The mirror shape appears in blues and teals, expressionistically brushed across entire surfaces or appearing more conservatively as a paper cutout or covertly on a painting on paper buried beneath the surface, as in his painting Peppermint Lounge, 1962. Even the works without collage elements from this time have a feeling of paper cutouts, the paint laid on thickly and in blocks across the surface. In many, the solid background serves to set off the improvised stroke—the artist’s spiritually-led flourish. In all of Woelffer’s work, paint has been applied with strokes that feel natural, quick, and improvisational, and which seem to carry great energy—an energy that suggests movement, or flight. — The Landing