By DOROTHY GRAFLY
REPRINTED FROM DESIGN MAGAZINE
The single work of art, like a sentence in a book, is part of a longer story
- the story of the individual's creative development, - and if it is lifted
from that context, it is as subject to misinterpretation as are the words
of speaker or writer. But while literary men grow vocal in protest, hundreds
of artists suffer annually from critical judgments based on single examples
of their work, seen in scattered exhibitions.
Some artists mature early, but do not grow. Their work today differs little
from what they were producing ten or even twenty years ago. Such painters
are easy to evaluate, and remain conveniently in a pigeon hole. But there
are others who never stop growing. What they did five often years ago appears,
on the surface, at such variance with current output that it might have
been produced by a different person. The discerning student, however, does
not take a picture out of its life context. He goes behind it to discover
the creative continuity tat serves as the thread upon which beads of growth
are strung.
There is an unfortunate tendency today to worship illiteracy in art. A man
who first touched a brush two months ago is too often hailed as a spontaneous
genius. What he does may be instinctive and naive, but, when weighed against
the serious growth experience of twenty or twenty-five disciplined professional
years, it serves only to confuse the student and the public.
It is, therefore, doubly important in an era of snap judgments, to focus
attention, not upon the latest creation of a particular painter, but upon
the chain of circumstances, experiences, and technical experiments that
went into its making.
From this point of view nothing is more revelatory than a show devoted to
the work of an individual artist, such as the invited exhibition that Anna
E. Meltzer is holding this fall at French and Co. Galleries.
Ten years ago Anna E. Meltzer was working from models, and transferring
to canvas a design-conditioned factual account of what she saw before her.
Today she has discarded the model, and works toward ail idea rather than
the projection of facts. "I want to express what I feel about people,"
she explains, "not just what is before me." But her ability to
do so has been a matter of evolution, and is the result of hard work, and
a mind open to suggestion and to change.
Anna E. Meltzer has in her family background a rich reservoir of creative
activity.
Her parents, however, did not look with favor on their youngster's
determination to become an artist. They preferred music as a profession,
and, it. is probable, that Anna Meltzer's stress on tonal values
is the direct result of an early training balanced between music and art.
Today she is studying intensively the relation of forms in art to forms
in music which, as an accomplished pianist, she experiences emotionally.
And it is her musical education that has given her insight into the world
of the abstract.
One of her recent paintings, the study of a quartet, experiments with visualization
of sound. Swirling around the players, who are stripped to the waist, are
bands of color that change as they cross each other. Springing from the
fingers, the ears, the instruments of the performers, these sound-colors
dominate the musicians, themselves. The painting is reproduced on the cover
of this month's Design.
Thus, Anna E. Meltzer, academically trained at Cooper Union, after twenty-five
years of experience, combines in her work the real and the unreal - the
body of the musician, and the abstraction of sound.
"Ensemble music," she says, "has a great deal of color. You
hear the individual instruments and follow their patterns. Symphonic music,
on the other hand, you do not hear as many instruments, but as one. It is
a synthesis, and must be so interpreted."
Colors in the quartet canvas change as sounds change when they cross each
other, or meet, and go on together.
\What Anna E. Meltzer senses in music she senses also in the human being.
The individual, to her, is not unlike music, where emotional forms meet,
cross, blend and change.
It is interesting to trace in her work her own shift in pictorial emphasis
from the good-humored caricature of "The Pretzel Woman Depositing
Her Savings" to the revealing
emotional intensity of "Confused" , the study of a young girl
whose bewilderment creates the focus of the composition. The instant you
look at the canvas you feel a deep mental and
emotional anguish. Since the essence of the picture lies in its human analysis
it is simply expressed, the confusion emanating from the personality, itself.
Pigments, also, are directly applied.
In a more recent composition, however, "The Big City".
Miss Meltzer paints a different sort of confusion.
Focusing interest on the close-up of a handsome young woman in a large hat,
she paints as background environment a complexity of figures, - all the
little people who mill in and out of a great railway terminal in a large
city. Each has its own little life story. There are nuns with children;
country folk; city commuters; a glamor girl ogled by a hick, and myriad
other folk caught here and there in the controlling light pattern of a spacious
architectural interior.
Simplicity is abandoned for complexity that follows the thought trend of
the canvas. The directly applied pigments of "Confused" are replaced
by an over-all color impression built of many colors; while the tiny figure
suggestions, and the carefully directed lighting, give conviction of space
and distance.
In such a composition the confusion is less psychopathic than actual. Thus,
in "Confused", the painter visualized mental maladjustment; while,
in"The Big City", she shows on the face of
the close-up girl a perplexity induced by external confusion. So deep is
Anna Meltzer's sympathy of people that, as a painter, she sometimes infers
on canvas emotions which she, herself, is unaware exist in the individual
she is painting. Her oil of a young receptionist whom she knew only as a
sweet, attractive girl, when completed, drew from a friend the instant exclamation:
"Why, you've painted Madame X !" Miss Meltzer protested
the interpretation, but. not long afterward, discovered its truth. Similarly,
she caught in the expression of another young woman the emotional thrust
of marital difficulties, entirely unknown to the painter at the time.
Anna E. Meltzer's art, in fact, has marked a steady advance from material
acceptance of objects to the projection of ideas in which realism
blends with abstraction. She has never followed any one trend, such as impressionism,
cubism, abstraction, but if a trend best expresses what she has to say,
she makes use of it. As a painter she has found from experience that the
most realistic subject has undertones of abstraction, and that the most
abstract somewhere in its formulation touches the real. To her, therefore,
mature interpretation of life demands a fusion of the two. This fusion,
however, is both visual and technical.
At first Miss Meltzer found satisfaction in the obvious. When she painted
"The Pretzel Woman" she began with an outline pattern drawn
with a brush. Then turning to color, she elaborated, adding many details
that, in the final analysis, were again deleted. They had, however, served
to create a focus in her own mind. Both in the outline drawing and in the
preliminary color study two figures were of equal value - the pretzel woman,
and a fellow depositor, whose bulk and color-weight disturbed the intended
focus. By a concentration of light and a simplification of the immediate
background, the painter, in the completed canvas, has left no doubt as to
the main actor in this revealing comedy of manners.
Here, also, the control of lighting foreshadowed the more nature development
of the recent compositions.
How Anna E. Meltzer progressed from factual statement to the painting of
ideas is readily traced in a comparison of '"Girl Filing Her
Nails" and "The Big City". In the former the
pigments are flatly handled, and pattern interest dominates. In a sense,
such canvases have proved the five finger exercises by means of which the
painter, like the musician, progresses from simple to complex, symphonic
creations.
But it was an opal ring that first stirred in Miss Meltzer a desire to paint
the seemingly unpaintable. "That opal ring," she says, "had
all the colors with which we work, but it also had depth and distance, -
something relatively unpaintable, yet there. So I began to experiment, and
found that, by using a palette knife, instead of a brush, I could lay
many colors in in their proper key, and at the same time achieve the effect
of a single color."
Before Miss Meltzer starts on a canvas she begins by playing with the placement
and interrelation of irregular geometric forms in a given space. When she
has arrived at the disposition she wants, she turns to a study of light
and dark masses, thus tying the masses in to prevent a break-up of the pattern.
Next comes the planning of color masses, without actually painting them;
and finally the development of the lighting effect.
The first study of the composition is laid out in a single color, with the
addition of a little white to get the proper values. Once this has been
achieved, Miss Meltzer feels free to express herself through sensitive value
relationships.
Her use of colors within a color, so effective in "The Big City",
is the result of a technical evolution that began some years ago in
"Girl at the Window", whose yellow blouse is flecked with
tiny color particles. The distant landscape seen through the window, however,
was flatly painted with a palette knife. Similarly, in "Moses",
myriad colors build the foreground figure, while the background is more
flatly painted.
In "The Big City", however, Miss Meltzer has developed
her background in the same technique as her foreground, achieving thereby
a more convincing focus, and an illusion of tri-dimensional form. In contrast
to "The Pretzel Woman" , the composition starts with a
palette knife outline, which the painter considers stronger and more definite
than the brush outline. "But," she warns, "in using a palette
knife you have to know just where you are going."
She paints, also, from light to dark, to make sure that, in over-painting,
the light comes through, thus guarding against muddiness of color.
Her advice to the student is: "First play with two-dimensional forms
within the space of your canvas. Then emphasize something important in the
foreground, and take out whatever interferes with that form. As a result
you get space going into the picture, and you can add perspective
lines for greater depth.
"You can, of course, have a middle as well as a background, always
taking out the forms that interfere as you go back."
"Big City" began with an outline drawing of the principal
figure, and actual painting started on the head. Next, neighboring values
were established, working down and outward, and building from light into
dark. The background, with its complex pattern of many figures and suggestion
of architectural form grew naturally out of the paint values adjacent to
the figure.
In a few color touches Miss Meltzer has given personality to a surprising
variety of types. A big city, she feels is a composite of personalities,
each distinct, yet each absorbed into the general environment. Thus, she
uses value relationship to fit the many parts into a coherent whole; and
as she works from light to dark, she also progresses from materialization
to abstraction.
But people are her passion. 'When I paint them." she insists, "I
go through their emotions with them. I couldn't live without them, and except
when I am working, I want them around me.
"I like to go out into the country and look at the landscape, but I
come back into the studio and paint people."
Now that she has gained basic knowledge of the figure, living models disturb
her.
"Time was," she says, "when I could not work without them.
Now I cannot work with them. As a child I was much more creative than immediately
after I married, due to a strong factual and photographic influence (her
husband, Samuel Meltzer, is a well-known photographer and teacher), and
to academic training at Cooper Union. Now, however, I know how to use that
training, and at the same time to express my own ideas rather than what
I see before me."
Miss Meltzer's own life has been filled with people. She can laugh, now,
over her two and a half room apartment, which, she declares, was exactly
like "You Can't Take It with You." One closet was used as a dark
room by her photographer husband; another as a laboratory by her son. Her
younger son, a composer, also had his niche, and she had her easel in a
corner. Everything went on at once, and everybody enjoyed it.
From such an environment has come an art of human insight, touched both
by humor and idealism.
Courage, Anna E. Meltzer feels, is an art essential. But, for an artist
to succeed, something more must be added - public recognition, and the sympathetic
understanding of critics and dealers. Only through such understanding, says
the painter, can an artist breed self-confidence, without which it is impossible
to push on to the goal.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARTICLE:
Dorothy Grafly, daughter of American sculptor Charles Grafly, was born in
Paris while her father was studying there. She received her B.A. at Wellesley
in 1918. Miss Grafly entered the newspaper field as a reporter and art critic
for the Philadelphia North American in 1920. She became art editor and feature
writer for the Public Ledger, from 1925 to sale of the paper in 1934. The
same posts were held on the Philadelphia Record from 1934 to 1942. She was
Curator of Collections and Lecturer at Drexel Institute of Technology from
1934 to 1944, and has been o special correspondent for the Christian Science
Monitor, since 1920. Miss Grafly is a contributing editor to the American
Artist. She is editor of Art Outlook, published by Philip Ragan Associates,
Inc., for which firm she has served as Director of Research and Art since
1942. Miss Grafly lectures on art in her spare time.