#3: The Webern Painting and the Early Paintings

Interview with George Mueller : 1/15/13

JMcWilliams: When you looked at one of your paintings from the 1950s, you called it your “Motherwell Period.” What did you mean by that? How well did you know Robert Motherwell?

Mueller: I met him, I didn’t know him all that well, but his work influenced me immediately. My wife Juliana had studied with him. My close friends, Carmen Cicero , Bud Sandal, Babe Shapiro were all students of his; Carmen had become good friends with him. I knew his work from years before I met him. I was immediately attracted to that style of painting, the instant that I saw it. It was like seeing Klein’s work for the first time, it was like recognizing something. It opened up patterns, ways of seeing and thinking that had not been open to me before, like Charlie Parker’s playing, no one had ever done anything like it before. It’s like finding friends you didn’t know you had. You didn’t know they were there but then you were glad they were, and sad when they weren’t there.

 I was already showing in galleries and selling when I finally met Motherwell; he was older than us. Not surprisingly, I liked him immediately. Carmen introduced me to him at the Cape. We were having drinks; mostly trying to get Motherwell’s boat started that day. It was one of those wooden Kris-Krafts? Very labor intensive. I liked him very much as a person, but I felt as if we had already been introduced through his work long before I met him. His kind of painting spoke very clearly to me. I felt very bad when he died. I was at The Cape with Carmen. We were on Carmen’s porch when the call came; he had had a stroke and died in the ambulance before they could get him to the hospital. It was a very sad day. I remember asking him about the “new” painting, the “Pop Art” stuff going on, and he said that he had been standing on Madison and 57th Street one day when he was struck by an overwhelming feeling that he was very “old and in the way.” Not long after that, he had the stroke. I felt very sad about what he had felt, the end of that era giving way especially to the mediocre stuff that followed. My first paintings, my first serious paintings were influenced by both Klein and Motherwell: Noumena I and II, Spad, etc. and Baziotes, early Baziotes. Frank Roth was mad about Baziotes and got me interested in him. All of my early paintings were from that period in time when I was most excited by those older painters. Motherwell said he had helped Baziotes hang a show and Baziotes wanted to take the whole thing down, you know, he wasn’t so sure of himself. Motherwell said that he had to talk Baziotes into leaving his show up. It impressed me at the time that these guys had been unsure of what they were onto and I suppose that insecurity stays with you no matter what you’re doing or how successful you become. I guess it should be that way.

Those Noumena paintings and the early paintings came before the spontaneous Vivisection, diamond shapes I was doing. I had been reading a lot of Kant, his distinctions between phenomena and noumena, a shadow version of phenomenon. You know, when you flirt with ideas that don’t really correspond to what you’re doing but you almost think they do. Kant had written about the thing in itself that you never see. We only see our version of things because that’s the way we’re put together. But there is a real thing behind each thing. The painting implied that this was a real thing that you could never see before, even though it’s not a recognizable thing. Kant was in the air in those days. I was reading a lot of philosophy: Berkley, etc. and, sometimes fragments or phrases would turn up in the titles of my paintings. I’m not sure how much they were really related. I remember one painting: Stage Fragment-Faust.

JMcW: Where is that painting now?

Mueller: Oh, that painting sold; I have no idea where it is now. I would love to see that one again.

JMcW: And those early paintings in the 50s were successful?

Mueller: Oh yes, they were almost all sold, in fact, I have only a few slides left and they were a large body of work in the mid to late 50s. They began my relationship with the Guggenheim and the dealer, Grace Borgenicht [Borgenicht Gallery]. In 1956 I began the series that were wild looking--painterly-- Vivisection, mid-late 50s. Grace wanted me to continue painting what had been selling so well. I had several shows with her and she sold everything right away for high prices; that was good, but she was not happy when I showed up with something new and untried. So, I just walked out. I never thought of my paintings as “periods” or anything like that, I would just think, “I’ve had enough of this” and I would have another idea. I was looking for a spontaneous response, no drawing at that time, and color. I didn’t plan anything. I think one of the best pieces of that period was Pleasant Street. Juliana taught 3rd grade at that time and a child in her class had died, a little boy. He lived on Pleasant Street and it really seemed significant to me. I had no reason for changing styles that I was aware of. It was an urge to do something with an idea that I had had. Something in my head gets tired and I try something else.

JMcW: And you left Borgenicht Gallery after doing so well there?

Mueller: It seemed to me that it was Grace Borgenicht’s job to sell my paintings; they weren’t her paintings, her ideas. It was my work. I wasn’t going to hang around painting stuff that she thought I should paint. So I took my canvases out of there the same day. I went to Oklahoma in 1959, I was asked to teach out there. Jo [Juliana] and I were married out there in Oklahoma City. When I came back I signed with Grippi Gallery; then Waddell after that.

JMcW: Did you ever do anything to deliberately enhance your “career”?  Did you never feel the need to chase fame?

Mueller: Waddell was always trying to get me to go to these parties. I went to a few, got drunk. What? What was I supposed to do? I painted the pictures, tied them to the roof of my car, got them to the gallery; was I supposed to wear a clown hat too? I tried. I went to a few parties. I remember one very loud party… Rothko was there. The music was so loud, the floor was moving. Rothko was in the corner, he was convinced the building was going to collapse on us. Once I threw up on John Ferren’s shoes. These were stupid parties that had nothing to do with liking art or seeing paintings.

JMcW: Tell me about this latest painting that you’ve done: Homage to Anton Webern. I know that it was very difficult to do and that’s it’s a smaller version of a large painting of yours that had been destroyed in a fire. Why the need to “re-do” that painting?

Mueller: I felt very sad about that painting. It had been bought by Harold Wachtel. Harold has collected a lot of my work over the years; a lot of the pieces are on walls in his homes and in his office buildings. That particular one was rolled and stored in a basement, the original painting was 18 feet long and it was very labor intensive piece of work. I doubt that I could, at this point in my life, have the physical strength to reproduce that. But I always loved that painting, it was worth the work, it was a good painting. And it couldn’t be salvaged after that fire, it was so badly damaged. It made me sick to think about it. It stayed in my mind that it was lost forever.

 I had drawings and pictures of it. Every time I came across some reference to it, I felt upset about it. So I decided to re-do it but on a smaller scale. There was no way I could do another 18 foot piece and I don’t have the studio space now to do that. So, it was a way to review that lost one. I felt I had a job that was hanging over my head.

JMcW: If only you could do that with people or life… just go back, do it over.

Mueller: Some things might be worth doing over.

JMcW: The original one was from the Summit Street, the “Porch Paintings” series, that you did in the 1960s. It had musical notation over the composition?

Mueller: After I had done a number of the porch series, I began to do weird things with the compositions, bending things, folding them in, doubling the porches. They were still architectural but they were changing. I did a few with music that I was particularly interested in at the time, the first was the painting that Glen  Davis  has: It’s a porch, with the first movement of a Webern String Quartet on the front porch.

JMcW: What is this latest one?

Mueller: Obviously it’s a piece by Anton Webern. It’s a favorite piece of mine. OPUS 10 no.3 and I liked the idea and the challenge of combining two things that are meaningful to me. But how do you put a piece of music on a porch? How do you put someone’s music in one of your paintings and stay in the abstract realm? I wanted to stay away from literalness, but I had this initial taste from something I had read by Wilhelm Reich, about being in a Russian town, snow, being in an attic, with old furniture and frosted light, and I wanted to get that feeling in the painting of a place of nostalgia with sound. So I gave myself this problem. First: re-create this painting that was forever lost, but I felt needed to be in the world, and then, layer music over the painting so that you’re hearing a piece of music over the visual.

JMcW: Why do you give yourself problems?

Mueller: When you’re used to working in a state of wondering: how this is going to work, it is an anxious way to be, but it’s better than not working. When I’m not working I feel useless. I’ve become used to the cycle, the cyclic way that I sometimes make for myself: what comes next?

JMcW: So what are you actually experiencing when working on a painting that has to do with music?

Mueller: Well, I’m hearing the music. I know it well. I am attempting to lay down sound over painting. The result is this painting with visually competing things, like hole punch cards from those old IBM punch cards, or player piano rolls because, I don’t want to paint “notes.” It’s my own transcription, my own notation that is very true to the music, but also stands out from the surface of the painting. From a distance it seems as if these little notations are actually floating in front of the grays. The grays, the quality of grays, were very important to this painting. It took me a long while just to figure out how to mix those to be just the way I wanted them to be and, I think it works. Standing back, these musical notations are just hanging there in front of the painting, they seem almost to be casting little shadows, but of course, they’re not.

I worked out a big background with a blizzard of little specks, even though the piece is a short piece of music. Webern’s music is A B music... a distillation of brief tones, like homeopathic medicine, a tone poem that lasts. “A whole novel in a sigh,” Schoenberg said. A life that is very brief. And of course the porch provides a nice geometric backdrop for contrapuntal activity. It was not brief to paint though, six months of very tedious, intense labor. I don’t want to do that again.

JMcW: But you said something before, about that original painting needing to be in the world?

Mueller: Yes, well, you want to hear--craving to hear something--you’re glad it’s in the world. I hear this piece as almost a collaborative effort with Webern now, not just like wearing headphones, it’s woven into my own painting. Music is the most abstract. Being with the painting now is like thinking like you do in a nature walk, something inexpressibly beautiful, not using words but instead the dimension of black and white with color notation.

JMcW: Do you feel that you need to have your work around you? You put it out there and you seem to miss not having pieces at your disposal; are they like pieces of yourself?

Mueller: Well, look. The paintings are for sale because I’m a painter and I’m supposed to make paintings that are for sale. But if I could keep everything I’ve ever done, yes, I like to know where these things are and it would be great to be able to see some of the paintings that I feel were important to me…to see them again. There are a couple of paintings that Wachtel has that I would love to look at again and I should have kept better records of things, but I lost track.

JMcW: Some paintings are “important” in what way?

Mueller: They help to pinpoint who I am, where I am and come from and all that, in the same way that one’s own progeny does, I think. Your children give you a point of reference for yourself and your life, don’t they? They are of you, reflect you, define you, in a sense and you’ve had a history with your children that is unique, that involves an entire set of thinking and behavior and actions that in a much smaller sense one has with one’s work. Your life, work, children…they are all what you make of them and leave behind, no?