DON EDDY: THE RESONANCE OF REALISM IN THE ART OF POST WAR AMERICA An art history monograph Internet publication by Virginia Anne Bonito, 1999. Published by ArtregisterPress.com. © Virginia Anne Bonito, 1999. All rights reserved.
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Chapter 3: Reflections

When, in his brilliant Impressionist statement A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1881-82, Edouard Manet transformed virtually the entire surface of his canvas into mirrored reflections of the popular cabaret, he closed a centuries-long chapter on Albertian pictorial space in Western painting. (Fig. 23 & Footnote 21) Not satisfied to rest on these laurels, Manet also introduced a spatial conundrum into the painting in the ‘double’ image of the barmaid.

Fig. 23 Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1881-82, oil on canvas, 37 1/2 x 51 in. Courtauld Gallery, London. Not to be reproduced without permission of the Courtauld Gallery, London

From the front, she is centralized and looks at the viewer who must be standing directly opposite and facing her in order to see her head-on. At the same time, the reflection (in the mirror) of her back can only be understood if the viewer is standing to the right (her proper left). With this ingenious assertion of two different viewing angles on the part of the viewer, Manet directed pictorial space on a course towards modernism. The monumental figure of the barmaid stands, however, not only as an emblem of visionary innovations in pictorial structures, but of the modernization of subject matter which was taking place in the work of Manet and his contemporaries. Far from the world of Titian’s Flora or Verrocchio’s Bust of a Lady (holding Primroses) (to whom the barmaid is pointedly linked by the corsage at the neckline of her lace trimmed jacket), Manet’s Suzon - trapped between the mirror and the bar - wistfully reflects on the shifted role of women in the open society of the later 19th century, Parisian bourgoisie. (Footnote 22) In its dazzling pictorial devices and contemporary subject matter, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère is a model of the resolution of issues that are central to the metamorphosis of style at whatever period, or, moment in time. It is a model, as well, of the continuing search for fresh formats and pictorial vocabulary which keep pace with change, which are timeless and timely, which are transcendent, yet, simultaneously in sync with their culture base. From the late 19th century on, especially the Western World (but more recently, the entire global population) has been witness to seismic shifts in society, government and technology as monarchies gave way to parliaments and democracies; as World Wars escalated to disasters which shook the foundation of state and soul; and as technological advancements transformed every aspect of life from the home, to the landscape, to star gazing. The primary subject matter of art had also shifted dramatically, away from religion, history and mythology to the representation of concerns of the society at large - the commonplace, the human dilemma, and to the nature of art itself. Against the backdrop of accelerated and expanded transformation of environment and society, and the challenges to keep pace that it presents, artistic vision has yielded an unfolding succession of responses (principal among which Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, Abstraction, Social Realism, Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism, and Photorealism can be counted). Even as a graduate studio artist, Eddy had already begun to understand that to create a genuinely rich, original, expressive art style - one that would advance upon the directions charted to that point - an artist must identify and employ subject matter that was contemporary, but that also derived from his particular culture base and that was second nature to him personally and as an artist. The Impressionists, for example, responding to the fast changing societal and scientific environment of the second half of the 19th century, had found new subject matter in the favorite haunts and locales of the Parisian bourgeoisie and a matrix for the development of new painting techniques. The Post Impressionists followed suit: Gauguin was drawn by the romantic lure of the South Seas to identify and appropriate the potent primitivism of ethnic art. Matisse, in the bold light of the Mediterranean and in the fashionable wall paper, rugs and fabrics of familiar surroundings, found the occasion to disassociate color and line from its service to verisimilitude in favor of expression. DuChamp and his Dada colleagues responded to breakthroughs in the investigations of psychiatry into the landscape of the mind; Hopper to the unexpected isolation of such banal environments as Automats or the Main Streets of Depression Era democracy. In each case, technique and subject matter joined forces to keep pace with the expression of the quickly shifting and evolving character of modern societies. Motivated by similar impulses and recognizing the contributions to this sort of energy that were being made by his Pop and Contemporary American Realist colleagues, Eddy began to fully explore the world of mid 60s America, and to extract its essential visual and experiential percepts. With them, he began to build a distinctly original pictorial system whose subject matter was quintessentially American. Eddy’s choice of the reflective surfaces of storefront windows for the series of paintings he produced in the decade of the ‘70s was clear and deliberate. They offered the possibility of a number of important areas of investigation that could be carried out separately or in sync as the problem demanded. There was no question of the appeal of storefront windows as subject matter; they are the substance of our contemporary, commonplace environment - transparent containers filled with imagery related to our daily experience. In his choice of quotidian subject matter Eddy, and for that matter, his Pop and Contemporary American Realist cronies as well, were following a route that had already begun to be charted. By the turn of the 20th century, America had taken its place as a leading nation of a new world order and, following suit, American subject matter had taken its place within the mainstream of Modernism. The Ash Can School painters, George Bellows, John Marin, Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth, George Ault, Charles Sheeler, and a host of others, each in turn, had found ways to boldly express the raw muscle, the pace, and the quotidian life of the modern metropolis, to articulate the phenomenon of the machine, and the consequent re-ordering of society and the landscape by industrialization. Sheeler, for one, was equally as skilled as a photographer as he was as a painter. In fact, the photographers played a key role in the early development and dissemination of a decidedly 20th century American point of view in art. The pioneer photographers, among them, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Sheeler, Walker Evans and Bernice Abbott began to direct their eye and lens away from portraiture, “artistic” and pictorial photography (which represented comfort zones of social acceptability). With clarity and courage, they used their lenses to develop intentionally “anti-aesthetic” modes of picturing, such as documentary photography or the vivification of fact in “straight” photography. Their new way of picturing sparked the expected controversies - akin to the old academic debates about the relative value of beauty and aesthetics - but they claimed for creative artistic enterprise the liberty of a democratic response to the new democratic social order. (Footnote 23) It is no accident either, that the alliance between photography and art should have been a central agent in the formulation of the bold expression of American culture by the Photorealists. (Footnote 24) As it concerns our discussion about subject matter and modernism, and, in particular, Eddy’s formulation of a pictorial vocabulary, it is worth recalling here that one of the important influences upon him during his years as a student at the University of Hawaii was his Professor Jean Charlot. Charlot, a painter, was partial to and influenced by Diego Rivera. Charlot imbued his students with Rivera’s passionate idealization of the worker’s place in society. He stirred in Eddy reflections upon the appropriateness of using his culture base, and the pace, ambiance and inventories that were part and parcel of the quotidian American environment as the vehicle (subject matter) for his pictorial language.

Fig. 24 Bernice Abbott A & P, New York, 1935 black and white photograph Bernice Abbott/Commerce Graphics Ltd., Inc. Fig. 25 Don Eddy Peaches, Tomatoies and Watermelons, 1972-73 acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 in. Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art.

Apropos of the discussion regarding the impact by the pioneers of American photography on the subject matter of American art, striking comparisons of Eddy’s work in the early ‘70s can be made with photographs by Paul Strand and Bernice Abbott. The resemblance between Paul Strand’s photograph Wire Wheel (1917) and Eddy’s Harley Hub, or between Bernice Abbott’s A&P and Eddy’s Peaches, Tomatoes and Watermelons, 1972-73, is notable. It would suggest that Eddy knew, and chose to reference these photographs, especially in light of the importance on many levels of photography to the Photorealists (of whom Don was considered a principal practitioner at the time). In reality, Don had no interest in the History of Photography; he had never seen either image, or any of the work of these great pioneer photographers of American subject matter. This would-be compellingly neat, but incorrect argument sounds a cautionary note regarding art historical methodology. More importantly, it offers a deeper insight into choices of subject matter and style made by artists as they grapple with issues regarding timeliness and modernity in their artistic vocabulary. The synchronicity of Abbot's and Don's impulses to respond to similar subject matter in their work highlights the seminal nature of certain aspects of the 20th century environment that in a particular moment seem ripe for artistic dialogue and interpretation. After Don’s initial surprise at seeing the Abbott photograph (which I showed him in an interview), his response to the striking similarity of the images was spontaneous and uncalculated. He explained that the socio-economic strata out of which he came was the one to which Abbott had responded in her photographic series. Bernice Abbott had returned to the US from Paris in 1929, the year of the disastrous Stock Market crash that marked the onset of the Depression. In Paris, she had been a successful portrait photographer, noted for being able to capture the true character of the great personalities of Europe’s intellectual and social elite with skill, art and acumen. What she saw in the America to which she returned, was not the saga of poverty, despair and economic chaos, but of a ‘modern society’ (an industrial and social mindset) able to ride the storm of economic disaster. She turned her lens not to the likes of FDR or Fiorello LaGuardia, nor to the street life and social pastimes of the city, but to a celebration of America’s unique strength. In her photographic series “ Changing New York” (shot in the Depression years 1935 -39), New York City became a symbol of a system which was fundamentally sound; where the old and the new were trading places, where daily life was sustained whether through government social programs or by virtue of a functional middle class. Her photographs of the well stocked shops, hardware stores, magazine stands and the like of the American middle class spoke of accessibility of goods and services - of commerce, which is the life blood of a city. In A&P - in the carefully aligned signs advertising “values” that are attached to the storefront window, in the neatly stacked items displayed on the shelf behind that window; in fact the stacked shelf may even have sparked an association with the massing of the emerging skyscrapers of Wall Street and mid town - she recognized, reflected upon and recorded an internal societal structure, order, and well being. Apart from his own decision to validate American subject matter as a corner stone of his art, Don's development of an advanced pictorial space and vocabulary of forms depended, as did many later 20th century artists, upon his experience of the French modernists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, the models were studied not as much as inspired examples of the transformation of prosaic subjects, but as indicators of the sorts of problems that needed to be posed and formulated into appropriate, fresh pictorial formats and vocabulary. Key here, is the fact that, notwithstanding his examination of European avant-garde masters, his rethinking of the basics of picture making was enmeshed in an American psyche, steeped in its own material and intellectual culture. Eddy’s painting Peaches, Tomatoes and Watermelons shares with Abbott’s photograph A&P an internal geometric order given by the neat arrangements of food stuffs and signage. The point of departure between the two is the window itself. Abbott took pains to block potential reflections on the glass, and, in fact to make the glass virtually disappear. The window in the photograph is thus reduced to a transparent support for the posted ‘store specials’ signs. Suspended, the signs establish a subtle game of plane and solid geometry with the stock on the shelves, and perhaps, more importantly, contribute an equilibrium between the second and third dimensions, that is between the signs and the ‘actual’ cans, boxes, bottles, eggs in crates, etc.. Between the generation of Bernice Abbott and that of Don Eddy, linguistic theorists - especially Noam Chomsky in America - fueled 20th century philosophy’s preoccupation with language as a focus of investigation. In the branch of philosophy known as Analytic and Linguistic Philosophy, language is recognized as a bridge between the mental and the physical world. Such analysis of language has engendered an expanded discourse on the nature of, and relationship between cognition and real existence (i.e. the object). In a landmark theory, Chomsky argued a “scheme of universal grammar” determined by “deep structures” or “innate pre-settings” in the human mind itself. These pre-settings, having their basis in the brain, set the pattern for the processing of all experience and infer innate ordering systems of sensory data as it is received. (Footnote 25) Interestingly, the concept of innate ordering systems aligns itself with the notion of universals, a discussion to which will be reserved for the last chapter. Taking a broad view of the development of branches of science especially since the second half of the 19th century, we are well aware of the spill over of new bodies of information into the fine arts. I cite as a simple example, the impact of “primitivism” on Post Impressionism and the early Modern movements as interest in anthropology and ethnography grew and information from these disciplines became more widely available. In the context of our discussion of advances in linguistic philosophy as they impact 20th century concepts of picture making, it is worth noting that anthropology and ethnography had drawn attention to languages. By the time Chomsky was developing his theories about generative and universal grammar, the data base could identify approximately 4000 spoken languages in the world. Aided by such disciplines as anthropology, ethnography and more recently, sociology, it should come as no surprise that current scientific and philosophic investigations into the nature of language, cognition, knowledge and perception should, in turn, impact the fine arts and provide inspiration and new points of departure, especially after the mid 20th century. If we turn our attention back to Eddy’s painting precisely at the point at which we left Bernice Abbott’s photograph - that is the signage - it is important to take note of the fact that the title of the painting “Peaches, Tomatoes, Watermelons” refers to the fruit displayed as ‘read’ from left to right and that the signs posted refer to other fruit and vegetables not seen. The signs might, in fact, initiate mental visualization or, at least, a search for plums and carrots among the actual visual information gathered on the picture surface. The painting, on one level then, stimulates a mental search or dialogue. On another level, as we continue to identify the dense agglomeration of objects and ephemera (transitory reflections) represented, it is clear that Eddy intended his storefront ‘windows’ to be a surrogate or model of the picture plane. In an essay for an exhibition of Eddy’s work at the Galerie Andre Francois Petit, Paris, 1973, Daniel Abadie wrote, “La vitrine, surface transparente qui tout a la fois permet de precevoir l’espace qu’elle revele et clot et de lire, dans son reflet, l’animation exterieure de la rue, peut etre consideree comme une metaphore de l’acte de peindre. La vitre, en effet, s’apparente a la surface vierge de la toile que le peintre creuse, selon les lois de la vision perspective, tout en restant exterieur a l’espace qu’il determine. Ainsi apparait l’analogie profonde entre la toile vierge et al vitre qui separe deux mondes d’images - celui de la rue et celue dur magasin: l’une et l’autre sont des lieux neutres ou peut se reveler un rapport imprevu entre des varietes d’images differentes...” (Footnote 26)

Fig 25. Don Eddy Peaches, Tomatoies and Watermelons

In Peaches, Tomatoes, Watermelons, the by-now-familiar issues of external and internal space in his work are given a more significant and complex role. In the upper left corner, bright light obliterates illusion. Immediately adjacent we identify the reflection of the rectilinear facade of a multi-storied city building (a surely unintended serendipity - at least for this writer - and one which is possible when art is rich with resonance) that seems to recall Abbott’s possible reference to the massing of such city buildings in the arrangement of the displayed food stuffs in her photograph. Long fluorescent lights, seen through the window front, assume the role of vanishing lines. Rather than pulling us into depth, they pull us to the convergence of the external and internal spatial realms - of the reflected building and the quasi-ephemeral objects and figures inside the store (who by virtue of being ‘viewed’ through glass, reflected light and reflections, have become less ‘substantial’). Fragile paper pinwheels echo the window signs dimensionally, calling attention again to the nature of written versus illusionistic information; to the verbal versus the visual domain; to word versus image.

Fig. 26 Don Eddy,Williams BBQ Chicken, 1973 acrylic on canvas, 63 x 48 in., private collection.

In Williams BBQ Chicken, 1973, Eddy takes pleasure in the augmentation and increased manipulation of similar pictorial ‘events’. (Fig. 26) A store front window - this time of a Manhattan prepared food eatery - is again featured, but, our ability to make sense out of, or in Chomsky’s terms, to structure the information presented is further challenged. For example, on the right, a catering advertisement sign, the awning of the adjacent building (Bretton Hall), the reflection of the facade of multi-storied apartment houses opposite the deli, and the pressed aluminum trim of the deli interior - balanced by equivalent translucencies - all intersect. In the center of the painting, the deep green color of the reflected trees is so saturated that they seem ‘actual’, while an equally intense presentation of the BBQ chickens (from which the painting, not accidentally, takes its name) projects them to ‘our’ side of the glass store front. Eddy introduced a delightful foil to the ‘field of reflections,’ in the marquee-style store sign that appears in the upper right corner of the painting. The two zones - the window and the store sign - are separated by a simple, dark diagonal band, representing the overhang of the sign where the rolled-up store awning rests. At the right, where the window and the dark over-hang meet, Eddy plays with the angulation of the deli window. There, he inserted a long, dark, slim triangle which hugs the right edge of the painting, and which is employed to arbitrarily shift the angle of the window so that it appears to diminish more forcefully than it should within the framework of the perspective structure of the painting. The triangular zone of the marquee-style sign above it, which for all intents and purposes is presented in a straightforward manner, is nonetheless, composed principally of lights. We begin to understand that light is perhaps Eddy’s main protagonist in the paintings of the decade of the ‘70s. However, despite the visual anomalies, the painting joins the ranks of classic art, in the balance struck among its various geometries and components, and, in its most harmoniously orchestrated palette of royal blue, blue-gray, and forest and jade green, punctuated by rose, pink and apricot.

Pictorial intention of the kind we encounter in Eddy’s paintings of the early ‘70s is the logical successor to the investigations of 20th century modernists on the nature of pictorial space. It should be regarded, in fact, not only as a fresh, but as a truly new formulation of arguments regarding the two dimensional illusion of three dimensional reality. We are all aware that such concerns are not the province of Modernism but are bound historically to the artistic creative process. They were already being codified in the paragone debates of the 16th century and in the academic art literature of the centuries following. In the 16th century, the debates took the form of comparisons on the relative merits of, for example, painting versus sculpture - that is, of a medium based on illusionism but that encompassed color and variety, versus a medium that produced actual three dimensional forms (the third dimension being the measure of reality/truth). (Footnote 27) Fig. 27. Georges Braque, Man with a Guitar (begun Summer 1911; completed early 1912) oil on canvas, 45 3/4 x 31 7/8 The Museum of Modern Art, NY. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Photograph © 1999 The Museum of Modern Art, NY. © 1999 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris These early formulations nonetheless already demonstrated the recognizable fascination of artists with the third dimension and the potential range of expression of it on a two dimensional surface. By the late 19th century, in the hands of Cezanne, Matisse and the Expressionists, aesthetic solutions to pictorial problems pushed towards a consuming interest in the independent activity of color and shape. Even Analytical Cubism’s complex transcription of visual reality (directed at issues regarding the representation of volume and space), exemplified here by Georges Braque, Man with Guitar, 1911, can be perceived not only as an exegesis of the third dimension, but as a threat to the balance between a dependence upon nature and the autonomy of art. (Fig. 27) Robert Rosenblum, for example, notes that it is an essential aspect of Cubism to deny a single definition of reality, and to replace it with multiple interpretation and the intention to confound. (Footnote 28) Notwithstanding Rosenblum’s observations, the simultaneous revelation of more than one aspect of an object in an effort to express its total three dimensionality was a primary aim of Analytical Cubism. In Analytical Cubism the concept ofsimultaneity - the famous ‘fourth dimension’ - replaced the static, systematic representation of depth by perspective. As John Canaday put it, “The fourth dimension is movement in depth, or time, or space-time, by the simultaneous presentation of multiple aspects of an object.” (Footnote 29) Simultaneity is expressed by the break down of forms into large facets or planes that represents the items seen from different vantage points; the planes - some opaque, some transparent - cross, overlap and merge. Though the resultant pictorial image is complex, the persons or objects represented are mundane and simple, usually referencing cafe-life and street musicians. The palette becomes quite restricted, subdued, and neutral, in order not to interfere with the readability of the formal structure.

It was especially in the decade of the ‘70s, in his deliberations regarding the challenge of re-defining pictorial conditions in new and appropriately contemporary terms, that Eddy gave careful consideration to the stylistic innovations introduced by the late 19th and 20th century vanguard modernists. His intention was not to put a new ‘spin’ on those innovations that had so profoundly changed the nature of picturing, but rather, to reflect upon the causal principles, conditions, and thought processes that had prompted them. Like road signs or lighthouses, the ideas of the vanguard modernists lit a path of philosophical reflection for Eddy upon the nature of transcendent art. As he set his sights on new formulae for the paintings that he produced in the decade of the ‘70s, he, most appropriately, coded them with references to the pioneers of Modernism whose insights were inspirational - especially Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Joseph Stella. Before returning to Eddy's paintings, it is perhaps useful, at this juncture, to begin to articulate an important difference between them and the paintings of the vanguard Modernists. Eddy’s are distinguished by the shift in intention (or direction) of the challenge posed, from canvas oriented solutions about space to experiential ones. The artist's two dimensional surface (canvas, panel, etc.) - the long acknowledged center of attention in the invention and representation of the illusion of the third dimension; in the development of Analytical Cubism’s fourth dimension; in the representation of optical illusion and kinetic phenomenon; in the zen minimalism of the raw materials of art - is no longer the principal point of departure for the challenge he wished to pose. Eddy’s challenge derived not from the canvas as the starting point, but from concepts regarding the ‘dimension of perception’ of the artist and the viewer, that is, his sensory and data processing ability. (Footnote 30) A critical corollary to the pictorial condition that Eddy sought to formulate and to construct, was that verisimilitude, by necessity, needed to maintain an essential position in his picture-making process. (Footnote 31) Representational images from our visual world were given a fresh purpose and a new vitality that drove beyond contemporary concepts of commercially produced facsimile bound up with ‘photo-realism,’ and materialism. For Eddy, the newfound purpose for verisimilitude was precisely the ability to mimic actual experience - perception. (Footnote 32) As he continued to paint, the rationale and purpose of ‘realism’ became clearer and clearer - to provide recognizable visual stimuli, veristic images (drawn from American material culture), that could be ‘graphed’ so-to-speak into the pictorial equivalent of advanced calculus problems or ‘quantum mechanics’ that challenge and exercise the function of computation. Galvanized by the Analytical Cubist phase of Georges Braque (as exemplified in Man with Guitar, Fig. 27), and by paintings like Joseph Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge, Eddy further continued to break down the picture surface into a more and more complex set of pictorial planes, and to fracture the internal logic of systematic spatial illusionism. In the group of paintings that followed the automobile showroom and the food store window fronts, he continued along the path of increasing visual=compositional complexity. Reflections remained the key protagonists, therefore he was not yet willing to abandon the advantageous scenario of the store windows; he searched, instead, for smaller retail items to take the spotlight as the ‘subjects’ behind the glass.

In Pots and Pans, 1972, he experimented with simple hardware. (Fig. 28) Clothing was another possibility. The Pop artists Jim Dine, Wayne Thiebaud and Andy Warhol had successfully adopted apparel such as bathrobes, ties and shoes for the subject matter of their paintings to serve, at one and the same time, as icons of the American Dream, and as emblems and parodies of consumerism, the individual, and anonymity. Eddy considered using clothing but was concerned about its decidedly anthropomorphic character. However, at the time, shoes were particularly colorful, and - running the gamut of fanciful to funky - provided an appropriate timbre or resonance. Furthermore, shoes have a sculptural dimension that could contribute a significant advantage to the intended spatial dynamics and complexity of his compositions. Fig. 28 Don Eddy, Pots and Pans, 1972 acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60 in. San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas.

From 1972 to 1974, Eddy produced six paintings of shoe store windows. New Shoes for H (introduced in Chapter 1 but represented again here for the reader's convenience) stands apart as an acknowledged masterpiece. It outstrips all of Eddy’s previous paintings in its dazzling visual effects - in the balances struck between information overload and a comfort zone of apparent comprehensibility, between beguiling spatial enigma and chaos, and a structural order dependent (in a reverential gesture) upon a ‘faceted’ grid. It represents a climax in experiments with spatial tensions, with collapsing space, with the confounding of our instinctual organizational patterns.

Fig. 1. Don Eddy, New Shoes for H, 1973-74, acrylic on canvas, 44 x 48 in. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio

As in Pontiac Showroom Window (Fig. 22), the location of the shoe store on a corner provides a set of store windows at 90 degrees to each other. We simultaneously encounter multiple sets of reflections; we see into the space of the store itself, and through both windows to 14th Street, to the buildings on the opposite side of 14th Street, and even to a mini-vista in the patch of green trees and buildings bordering Union Square. Towards the left edge of the painting, inside the glass corner of the store, a mirrored column offers a subtext in reflections of a different quality and complexity. The convergence of the two busy cross streets lined with arcaded, gridded late 19th century buildings, passers-by, stores, and street traffic colliding into themselves add to the spectacular array of segments of interior versus exterior space, ephemera, light and motion seemingly released from any reference to natural law. The store; the surrounding buildings and busy sidewalks; a red truck moving down 14th Street and the green bus turning the corner are captured in an alchemical moment. Reality, motion and transient reflection fuse, only to burst into a faceted, “cubistic” kaleidoscope of intense, whitened or paled out colors and forms - some 'actual,' some reflected in the mirrored column, some caught momentarily as ephemera on the window, some seen through the two panes of glass, others overlapping actual objects like ghostly apparitions (as, for example, the shoes and handbags). Inside the store, the jaunty arrangement of the pairs of shoes sparked the artist to novel compositional solutions for time-honored, modernist Cubist and Futurist concepts of space and motion. The shoes, enhanced by their own reflections in the internal mirrored column and by the play of shadows and outside reflections that move across their surface - suggest an animated diagram of a Fred Astaire number. Light, the deus ex machina, orchestrates its own subtexts as for example in the playful interchange, on the right, between the reflection of a constellation-like cluster of lit store flood lights floating across the double reflection of an extinguished street lamp. Light, in its functions of describing, echoing, or obliterating form, is the organizing agent of the picture surface. Like mythological Arachne, it weaves a tapestry of stunning complexity, interlocking ‘actual’ space and objects with virtually abstract color fields (described in rectilinear patches of blues, reds, oranges, and greens) and reflections that vibrate between ephemera and the weight, density and intensity of the ‘real’ objects or space.

Fig. 29 Hans Hofmann Land of Bliss and Wonder, California, 1960 oil on canvas, 52 x 60 in., whereabouts unknown. © Estate of Hans Hoffmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Fig. 1. Don Eddy, New Shoes for H, 1973-74 acrylic on canvas, 44 x 48 in. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio.

We recall that encoded in the title New Shoes for H, is a key to an important and illuminating source of inspiration for the painting. The H stands for Hans Hofmann, highly regarded teacher and noted member of the New York School. Though Eddy did not study with Hofmann, his work was seminal to Eddy’s thought process at that moment. Hofmann’s Land of Bliss and Wonder, California, 1960, offered an fundamental criterion for the organization of composition and color in New Shoes for H. (Fig. 29) Particularly striking is the translation of Hofmann’s dynamic, overlapping red/green complementary rectangles into unparalleled echoes in the Simco sign and its companion reflection. Equally important is the fact that, like Hofmann’s, Eddy’s canvas is dense and rhythmical without loss of integrity, reference points, or balance. Each painting informs the other’s ‘realities’ in an extraordinary way. In the process of the creative, artistic liberation of pictorial imagery from the terrestrial, gravity bound actuality of the world we see - the world described mathematically through three dimensional Euclidean geometry, through the Cartesian coordinates X, Y, Z - Eddy took Hofmann’s abstraction as a guide. It is worth recalling, in the context of our discussion, that it was just after World War I that Albert Einstein developed non-Euclidean geometry by introducing time into the equation, as related to X, Y, Z, suggesting a fourth dimension. Such scientific breakthroughs caused immediate reactions in the art community with movements like Analytical Cubism, Dada and Abstraction and continued reverberations, of the sort we are discussing, right to the present day. Under the profound influence of theoreticians like Hans Hofmann and Josef Albers, and, of the impact of ‘60s Color Field painting, Eddy also gave careful consideration, in this period of the ‘70s, to the role of color as an independent cohort of form. Telling, in this regard, is the fact that the paintings we have been discussing to this point, as well as those he produced into the middle of the next decade, depend on black and white, rather than color photographs. Eddy artificially imposed the color in all of these paintings, viewing it as a separate but related exercise in problem solving. The aim was to identify a color system that was appropriate to his imagery and expressive of the culture base of the paintings, a corollary to the social and cultural atmosphere of post ‘60s America, yet genetically and intuitively his own. Along these lines, some comments by Hofmann on issues related to form, color, and artistic creativity that were ‘in the air’ are illuminating. Hofmann noted, for example:

“Painting has many problems, but the foremost is the synchronized development of both form and color.” (Footnote 33) “Pictorial life is a created reality. Without it pictorial communication - the appeal to the senses and the mind - is non-existent. Color, in nature as well as in the picture, is an agent to give the highest aesthetic enjoyment. The emotion-releasing faculty of color related to the formal aspect of the work becomes a means to awaken in us feelings to which the medium of expression respond analogously when we attempt to realize our experiences creatively. Upon it will depend the formal and psychic appeal of the created image which is finally achieved through an absolute synchronization, in which a multitude of seemingly incompatible developments have been firmly interwoven - molded in the synthesis of the work.” (Footnote 34)

Such ideas regarding the nature of creative energy and the essential requisites for determining its visual expression are rich with resonance. Though Eddy was not exploring the emotional valence of color, such revelations and codification of the creative process as expressed by Hofmann were certainly in line with and important to him as he considered issues regarding color as well as the aim and direction of his own creative impulses. In New Shoes for H.M., 1973, and Silver Shoes, 1974, Eddy relaxed the complex geometries of his spatial dynamics for an interlude with the effects of color, softened line and pattern as they might support and/or dissolve the internal logic of the X,Y,Z coordinates associated with normal vision. (Figs. 30 & 32) His specific experiments with color were guided here, much as his investigations of pictorial space and composition had been, primarily by referencing the late 19th century French masters; and, again, providing a route to problem solving.

Fig. 30 Don Eddy New Shoes for H.M., 1973 acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 in. private collection. Fig. 31 Henri Matisse, La Musique (Music), 1939 oil on canvas, 45 3/8 x 45 3/8 in. Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Room of Contemporary Art Fund, 1940. © 1999 Succession H. Matisse, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In New Shoes for H.M., the allusion is to a painting, La Musique by Henri Matisse. (Fig. 31) A playful mood permeates the painting, without compromising familiar compositional formalities. A decorative pattern given by pairs of platform shoes dispersed across the picture surface intersects and holds the more familiar rectilinear structure of reflected buildings and vehicles in check, close to the foreground. The shoes, following a jazzy arrangement of the kind we encountered in New Shoes for H, are described by bright, artificial, interlocked color fields (akin to Post-Impressionist “cloisonnisme”) which repeat the shapes of their archings and soles. The shoes overtake the picture surface, in a repetitive sequence of the sort popularized by Warhol and his cronies. Their high pitched color - kelly green, red, black, grape, turquoise - further amplifies the deliberately decorative scheme.

Fig. 32 Don Eddy, Silver Shoes, 1974 acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40 in. collection Richard and Monica Segal.

Fig. 33 Pierre Bonnard, Dining Room in the Country, 1913 oil on canvas, 64 3/4 x 81 cm. © by The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. © 1999 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Silver Shoes follows a format similar to New Shoes for H.M. (Fig. 32) However, in contrast to the bold color and decorative function of pattern and line, in Silver Shoes Eddy tests the opposite condition of the potential yield of subdued palette as it impacts structure and the presence of the overall image. Paintings like Claude Monet’s Haystack at Sunset near Giverny, 1891 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Pierre Bonnard’s Dining Room in the Country, 1913, were the gauge for the examination of the chromatic power of tints and hues, primarily those of the secondary colors. (Fig. 33) In Silver Shoes, the class and cut of the shoes is decidedly feminine and graceful. Muted and diffused pastel blue, pink, apricot and mint green forms seem to float in an effortless, but orderly cascade towards the silver shoes and sandals (from which the painting takes its name) at the lower border and in the right corner. Again the title is a key to a more complete understanding of the pictorial intent of the painting. The silver shoes in particular, with their straps fashioned into web-like patterns of silvery reflected tones, are poised on a field of intense velvety orange. In the “flirtation” between reflected light and hard edged fields of intense, virtually local color, clearly, the answer to the question posed is that subtlety holds powers of its own. By the way, Flirtation is, to be sure not accidentally, the brand name of the shoes displayed. Notwithstanding these few explorations into the nature of subtlety, the paintings produced in 1974 -76 are marked by a drive towards chaos. Some continue to feature shoes, others include hosiery and handbags, and yet others feature jewelry and silverware. Eddy's intention was to find smaller and smaller objects, or, objects which would ‘pump up the volume’ of reflections or fragmentation. The aim was to press the limits of comprehensibility and to increase the tension between information overload and compositional stability, in order to test boundaries and to identify the absolute limits of an effective image. Guided in part by his consideration of the use of color by Matisse and the Fauves, where color plays a significant role in the paintings, it is used to impose an artificiality that would amplify the pandemonium. Sections of large, phantom automobiles appear, like a refrain, augmenting this ‘drive.’ The shoe paintings, especially Hosiery, Handbags and Shoes (1974 ) become denser. The pairs of shoes are positioned at more diverse angles to each other, but are not pushed into depth, thus creating torsion at the level of the picture plane.

Fig. 34 Don Eddy, M. Raphael Silverware, 1975 acrylic on canvas, 60 x 40 in. private collection.

Perhaps it is no accident that while pondering the color systems of the French Impressionists and Post Impressionists, and in particular, Impressionism of the sort exemplified by Monet's Haystacks series, would Eddy discover in its premise - in form dissolved in the thrall of reflected light - a key to a new direction in the investigation of the breakdown of structure by reflections. Nor is it surprising, that when he finally turned his full attention to a profound examination of the impact of pure, unadulterated reflection on pictorial structure, he ultimately elected to drop color out. The intuition to continue to mute color, and to finally avoid color altogether is borne out as the logical corollary to investigations of this sort. One of the best examples of this impulse is provided by the Analytical Cubists, who had made a similar choice to severely reduce color as their canvases became structurally more complex. Issues about the control and limitation of colors in painting had begun to be articulated by Eddy as early as Pots and Pans, 1972, and Williams BBQ Chicken, 1973. (Figs. 28 & 26) The first “Silverware” paintings are the logical successors of these early experiments. In Silverware for M, 1975 (M stands for Monet), and M. Raphael Silverware, 1975 - which also represent a last stand with store front windows as subject matter - Eddy logically turned to silverware for its inherent highly reflective and monochromatic properties. (Fig. 34) In consideration of his determination - in this moment in the mid ‘70s - not just to study, but to scrutinize the pictorial properties of form and structure as a problem separate from the examination of color, where color is deployed in these paintings, it is done so in a superbly orchestrated, muted palette locked into a dimensional, rectilinear grid.

Figs. 35 & 36 Don Eddy, Gorevic Silver, 1975-6 acrylic on canvas, 50 x 70 in. private collection (full view above, detail below right.)

At this juncture, Eddy bid adieu to the specters of automobiles, to the storefront windows and to the world of reflections on a cinematic scale. He moved inside the stores. Though the scale of the canvases remained large, he began to restrict his picture field as well as his palette, both in scope and depth. The subsequent paintings, Silverware for S.F., 1975, Gorevic Silver, 1975-6, and Silverware II, are distinguished by imposing, simplified grids and fields of limited colors - dark browns, grays, subtle pinks and greens, and deep rich blue - which frame lavish displays of silverware items. (Figs. 35 & 36) The silverware was chosen not for its richesse - a concept quite at odds with the ‘pop’ culture/democratic orientation of the oeuvre thus far - but, like the bumpers of the early car paintings, for its alternatingly tooled and smooth, infinitely varied, curved surfaces over which reflections could take on a life and identity of their own. The integrity of the object (visual equivalent of discrete verbal content, of nouns) that had provided so important a point of departure for Eddy less than a decade earlier, begins now to be threatened and to break down. Reflections, redoubled into reflections of reflections, ephemeral and amorphous, challenge formal integrity and drive towards abstractions. The paintings are luminous, surreal, and deceptive in their seeming order and simplicity. In Gorevic Silver, for example, we are without the means to unearth a complete manipulation on the part of the artist. The apparent ‘reflection’ in the glass countertop on the left, is not a reflection at all.

It is a mirror image of the top left shelf, which Eddy arbitrarily flipped. We suddenly find ourselves, like Alice, on the other side of the looking glass, in a magical world, where although our normal reference points are no longer useful, we are nonetheless pleasantly at ease and fascinated by indecipherable oddities, curiosities and complexities. The breakdown of form by reflection assumes center stage; arbitrary fragments of objects (that is, whatever parts of objects might be caught by the position of the viewer in time on the silverware surfaces) begin to function like formal elements, with fluid contours and movement reminiscent of Matisse. It would not be long before they would become absolute, independent elements.

Fig. 37 Don Eddy, SilverwareV for S., 1977 acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40 in. private collection or Sarah Eddy, Washington, DC.

In a series of smaller paintings, “Silverware I - V,” Eddy continued to zoom in on his subject matter, narrowing his reference point to central portions of the store display shelves and allowing the silverware to overtake the entire picture surface. In Silverware III, IV and V (1976 - 77), any reference to the wooden cabinetry of the shelves drops out. (Fig. 37) From the standpoint of composition, this decision marked a dramatic change in format for the presentation of his subject matter - from unique equivalents of city views and genre painting to a unique variant of still life painting. We might be tempted to classify the "Silverware" series and the two that followed - that is, the “Glassware” series and the “Color” series - too rigidly within the traditional category of still life painting. However, a quick comparison with still life paintings by Eddy’s contemporaries demonstrates the discomfort of too neat a categorization of this sort. These next series of paintings are quintessential Eddy, and as such are something of a breed-unto-themselves. Other Popsters and Photorealists, following closely on the heels of venerable still life painters of the past, continued to feature displays of edibles and related items, replacing the familiar roemers, steins, objets de vertu, bowls of fruit, paisley cloths, pewter tableware, vases of flowers, orbs and time pieces with contemporary tableware and delectibles. Wayne Thiebaud’s Pies, 1961, Claes Oldenburg’s Pastry Case I, 1961-62, Carolyn Brady’s Blueberry Jam, 1979, and Ralph Goings Relish, 1994, in fact demonstrate the versatility, range, ingenuity and quality of contemporary American still life paintings. (Footnote 35 & Fig. 38)

Fig. 38 Ralph Goings, Relish, 1994 oil on canvas, 44 x 64 1/2 in. collection Richard and Monica Segal

A closer look at Eddy’s Silverware V for S., and, for example, Goings Relish offers an instructive comparison in the discussion of Eddy’s expansion of the traditional categories of painting as formats for the presentation of new and different sorts of subject matter. (Figs. 37 & 38) Goings called diner accessories - salt and pepper shakers; ketchup, mustard and relish jars; sugar bowls and the like - into service in the construction of Relish. The result is a classic still life composition worthy of the achievements of Claez Heda, Chardin and Braque within their own cultural and socio-economic milieu. As a category, still life painting offers not only bravura detail and stunning composition, but often carries a moral message - for example, it can function as a symbol of vanitas= memento mori (that is, of transience), or of pride in a national economy or individual social status. In the balance and rhythm of Goings’s monumental crystalline geometries, one can find such a skillfully articulated message - the affirmation of the fundamental stability of middle class America. It is not so much the dense distribution of silver trays and vessels across the picture surface of Silverware V for S that represents a shift in the standard formats for still life painting, but the pictorial intent of the painting. And, while Eddy tips his hat to the noble tradition of still life in the "Silverware" paintings, his intention is not to re-invigorate, or 'contemporize' that tradition, but to push beyond it and to forge new ground. The "Silverware," and future "Glassware" and "Color" series, represent the systematic development of a unique framework, an experimental laboratory of sorts, for the invention of synthetic constructions that hold within them intriguing new pictorial propositions that will be the subject of our further investigation here and in the following chapter. Cezanne, for example, had used still life painting as a vehicle for the study of formal and structural problems presented by the medium of painting. Typically, Eddy took landmark innovations like Cézanne's as a point of departure, and typically they sparked extraordinary and innovative responses. While the "Silverware" series as a whole became a starting point for a renewed study of the various structures made possible in painting, Silverware IV and V mark an especially dramatic turning point. Like Cezanne and other artists, who in the study of the structure of forms discovered a brushwork technique and color by which to express them, in Silverware IV and V, Eddy finally found his own true ‘brushstroke’ or gesture. From that point forward this gesture became the exclusive technical starting point (notwithstanding later elaboration) for all the paintings that have followed. This gesture gave expression to new structural possibilities that outweighed compositional format in the development of new frameworks for the presentation of subject matter. With Silverware IV, Eddy began to use his airbrush to make tiny circles that he knit into a diaphanous net. (Fig. 39) Each tiny circle - its shape arbitrary and completely independent of the description of the object being represented - is, for all intents and purposes, a discrete entity. Interestingly, however, as Eddy disconnected his mark or gesture from mimicking the formal properties of the object, he did not return to a dependency on silhouette or outline. His under drawings began to take on the aspect of topographical maps, which relax the definition of territorial boundaries in favor of charting elevations. In the case of the under drawings, outline disappeared in favor of plotting the overall subtle gradations of lights to darks.

Fig. 39 Don Eddy, Silverware IV, 1977 acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30 in. private collection.

It is worth noting here, that Eddy's formulation of a personal gesture is part and parcel of the artistic persona of painters. Within the time-honored, overarching category identified as Realism (as many of the readers of this text are likely aware), the brushwork of its practitioners can vary dramatically, from being very precise and tight at one end of the scale to open and painterly at the other end. As an example of this among the ranks of the Old Masters, one could compare the difference between the surface of a painting by Jan van Eyck versus one by El Greco or Rubens. In the second half of the 20th century, the practitioners of Realism share similar sensibilities. On the sharp focus side, one could cite Richard Estes or Juan Gonzalez. Others, like Chuck Close, Ralph Goings and Joseph Raffael, who were trained as Abstract Expressionists have incorporated expressive gestures into their pictorial process. At close range the figural images on their picture surfaces dissolve into highly expressive marks of color, freed of the obligation to define form. This tension between verisimilitude and a picture surface built on marks that incorporate other references (whether they be to a modernist style or a surrogate that can conjure mechanical printing techniques and the like) lends vitality and viability to a time honored method of picturing. Virtually simultaneously with the decision to use the tiny circle as his gesture, Eddy rejected any use of local or declared color, and turned to the purest application of his three part color system. We recall that the system depends on the superimposition of three colors - pthalocyanine green, burnt sienna and dioxazine purple, applied in that order. A delicate, virtually transparent paint film made up of mesh-like overlays of green, burnt sienna and purple ultimately generated the image. The value of each of these color layers was equilibrated, and applied with utmost restraint to impart only cool versus warm tonalities and the very subtle differentiation in value of darks and lights necessary to describe the virtually colorless materials of the silverware and glass. Eddy thereby reduced not only the objects, but also the means by which he described them - their internal structure - into micro-components. The impact of his symbiotic network of circles, articulated through his tripartite color system, into lace-like layers of superimposed color was the atomization of form and the dissolution of the apparent solidity of the picture surface; the consequent sum result was a surface with a scintillating optical resonance. In Silverware V for S, Eddy again tests our ability to discern a manipulation of the laws of nature, perception and perspective. The two parallel vertical lines in the center of the composition represent the overlap of the two panes of the sliding glass doors of the cabinet. Given the viewing angle that looks down onto the shelves, these lines should not be parallel but should converge slightly towards the bottom of the painting. Yet, we are not disturbed. The parallel lines of the overlapping sliding glass signal another condition as well. The array of silverware is viewed through panes of glass; thus, the picture surface itself must, for all intents and purposes, be understood as glass, and as such is a rich allusion to Alberti and the art of painting. A note about the title Silverware V for S is appropriate here. S is a dedication to Eddy’s daughter, Sarah, and not to a favored artist. It underscores a crucial shift in the artist’s creative process; it marks a move away from outside sources and towards ultimate trust in himself as his own creative wellspring and guide.

Fig. 40. Don Eddy, Glassware I, 1978 acrylic on canvas, 52 x 40 in. private collection.

At this point, Eddy abandoned the subject matter of stores altogether, and made the decision to move into his studio. In doing so, he eliminated the now inexpedient, random element of being, to some extent, at the mercy of a predetermined ordering of his compositions by others (i.e. the shopkeepers). Furthermore, he could control the direction and quality of light; it is after all, the quality and direction of light that makes both reflection and transparency possible. In the hermetic environment of his studio, he was able to impose a clinical rigor by which to logically and calculatedly probe further the mysteries of pictorial structure, ephemera and illusion; of the nature of representation, perception and cognition. Taking his cue from the silverware shelves and diner food cases, he constructed tiered glass store display shelves, mirrored on all four sides and at the back, upon which he arranged dense, orderly compositions of stemmed glassware. As with the “Silverware” series, he produced only five paintings of “Glassware,” from 1978 to 1980. With Glassware I, 1978, he began to favor his larger scale again. (Fig. 40) In the "Glassware" series Eddy's three part, diaphanous color system functioned as the perfect surrogate of reflected, refracted light. With this event Eddy had, in a sense, come full circle; a pleasing serendipity for an artist who enjoys turning the tables on things. Eddy's deliberate transformation of the painter's traditional brushstroke into a system of component parts, that began in the late 60s with the three part overlays of color, and later encompassed the breakdown of the movement of his airbrush into tiny circular gestures, was guided, in part, by the experience of making tempera paintings according to the technique of the Proto-Renaissance masters. The Renaissance masters of tempera built form and the illusion of three dimensionality (for all intents and purposes, solidity) out of a network of finely knit hatched lines of pure pigment laid in layers of varying tints and hues over green underground. Eddy was fascinated by the manner in which the little gestures accumulated into a surface. As he originally envisioned it, his color system was meant to function like a 3 color hybrid of a grisaille-like green underground. With the Glassware series that 'underground' found its way to the surface of his paintings. The choice of glassware and mirrors for the series was conscious; the glassware especially, for its transparency. It was the equivalent of form dematerialized. In combination, the materials were meant to push the limits of light - and consequently reflection - as agents of deconstruction.

Fig. 41 Don Eddy, Glassware V, 1980 acrylic on canvas, 60 in. diameter private collection.

Purity and the hypnotic power of its icy intelligence distinguish the "Glassware" series. Its culmination, Glassware V, 1980, is a summa of the investigation of the nature and potential of reflections as a component of the picture making process. (Fig. 41) It is a monumental tondo - a perfect circle, a signal that the artistic colloquy with concepts of transparency, reflection and ephemera has come full circle. The tondo shape reverberates the shapes of the glasses and, serendipitously, the artist’s circular gestures as well. The starting point of the painting is still a black and white photograph; and the tension between flatness and dimensionality, between figure and ground, between abstraction and form are purposely heightened. A slender vertical blue field (the ‘optical reverberation’ of the structural corner member of the shelf), syncopated white crescents (the path of reflections of Don’s photographic studio flood lights), and the ruled black lines (the edges of the glass shelves) vie for primacy with the three dimensional representation of the stemware. As a set, the diagonal black lines, in fact, alternate between being read dimensionally, or, as an independent decorative, organizing lozenge pattern which accentuates two dimensionality and the surface at the expense of the illusion of the third dimension. Glassware V is, ultimately, a demonstration of the fullest potential of dynamic tension, reflection and transparency in their role as deconstructing agents in the dematerialization of form, and as such, it is a consummate statement on the nature and grand illusion of picture making. I have left a discussion of Eddy’s relationship to his Photorealist colleagues until now, because as one becomes familiar with the direction of Eddy’s thought, the distinctions between him and these colleagues are more readily understood. Eddy was certainly aware of the work of other Contemporary American Realists, especially the most prominent group of the decade of the 70s, the Photorealists. In one way or another all were looking to get away from, as Robert Bechtle put it, “the stylistic cliches of the then current painting scene (i.e. modernism).” (Footnote 36) Each of the 20, or so, most highly regarded practitioners seems to have staked out particular territory - John Baeder, diners; Chuck Close, portraits; Audrey Flack - contemporary vanitas still life; Ron Kleeman - semi cabs and race cars; Jack Kacere - female torsos in lacy undergarments; Richard Mc Clean - horseback riders; and so on. Tom Blackwell, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, and Richard Estes shared an interest in what urban city streets might offer as subject matter. When asked about the influence of his talented peers upon his own work, Eddy noted that he was certainly aware of what they were doing, and that to keep himself true to his unique vision, he would check the impulse to respond through drawings. For example, he made a color pencil sketch in which he featured a VW - recall this main protagonist of his own paintings, ca. 1970 - but, in this case, centrally positioned and parked at a suburban curb alla Bechtle’s Chevies, Fords, etc. and Goings’s campers and pick up trucks. To come to terms with Cottingham he transposed his own paintings of parking lots and wrecking yards of automobiles into a drawing of a wrecking yard of street signs. He did, however, allow himself a flirtation with Cottingham’s signature paintings of storefront signage in the marquee style-and-neon store sign in the upper right of Williams BBQ Chicken. (For Williams BBQ Chicken, see above, Fig. 26) Eddy shared with Tom Blackwell and Richard Estes the fascination with reflections in storefront windows. Blackwell used the windows to focus on reflections of passers-by played-off against store mannequins in a reconfiguration of Pop Art’s messages about consumerism, and the widening gap between individuality and gross anonymity in the mass culture of the later 20th century. In the stunning tours de force with reflective surfaces, and the consequent heightened visual appeal of their paintings, these three Photorealists in particular, were responding, as well, to such theories as Marshall McLuhen’s regarding the impact of technologically advanced communication media in the shift from a “print” culture (primarily the printed word) to a “visual” one (TV and Cinema). (Footnote 37)

Fig. 42. Richard Estes, Central Savings, 1975 acrylic and oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in. Nelson Atkins, Kansas City, MO. © Richard Estes/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY/Marborough Gallery, NY Fig. 1. Don Eddy, New Shoes for H, 1973-74 acrylic on canvas, 44 x 48 in. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio.

The artist with whom Don Eddy appeared to have the most in common was Richard Estes. The point of convergence with Estes was in the years 1971-75. A comparison between Richard Estes’s Central Savings, 1975, and Eddy’s New Shoes for H is helpful in underscoring both the commonalties, but more importantly, the elemental differences between these two master painters of reflections and reflected images. (Figs. 42 & Fig. 1) Both artists clearly delight in the opportunities for pictorial complexity offered by expanses of glass in the modern urban environment. Estes has continued, throughout his career, to mine this subject matter most successfully in the production of one after another of stunning city vistas. Eddy, as we have discovered, did not stay with this sort of pictorial imagery for long. Estes’s painting, Central Savings, like Eddy’s New Shoes for H, features a Manhattan corner store - in this case a cafeteria - with glass converging at 90 degree angles. We see into the space and through both glass windows to the sharp perspectival recession of buildings on the side street. The quasi-transparent, glass window front of the cafeteria reflects the glass window of the Central Savings Bank directly across the street. Inside the cafeteria, the mirrored surfaces of an internal column and back wall reverberate the set of red counter tops inside the eatery; the reflection of the cafeteria in the Central Savings Bank window; and the reflection of the continuation of the side street on the Central Savings Bank side. Quite in contrast to Eddy’s New Shoes for H, in spite of the similarly complex dialogue of reflections, in Central Savings our eye is carried deep into a funneled, ‘background’ focal zone - suggestive of steeply foreshortened one point perspective systems - where the diverse components of the painting (the tensions of fragmentation) seem to stabilize and resolve.

Fig. 43. Richard Estes, Spirit, 1995-96, acrylic and oil on canvas, 38 x 65 1/2 in. collection Richard & Monica Segal. © Richard Estes/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY/Marborough Gallery, NY

Estes, like Eddy was well aware of the limitations of traditional perspective systems; his pleasure, in his paintings, was to give an impression of the dynamic environment of the later 20th century city through the manipulation of traditional perspective systems. Thus, he might at times opt to employ many vanishing points in his paintings, with the intention to approximate the effect of the contemporary eye, obliged to scan and travel around and over a myriad of things. (Footnote 38 & Fig. 43) In his stunning city views - featuring the Avenues, the harbors, and sections through the busses and bridges of major cities, especially New York - Estes orchestrates multiple (often accentuated) recessions, and sleek, sparkling surfaces to yield the late 20th century equivalent of the 18th veduta. In this, he is the contemporary counterpart of such masters as Canaletto, Bellotto and Guardi whose vision he equals also by the quality, refinement and luster of his pictorial surfaces. Yet in his daring expressions of the face, space and movement of the dense late 20th century urban environment he is heir, as well, to the inventiveness and imagination of the dynamic Cubists and the Futurists who began to explore the visualization of fast-paced ‘modernism.’ Don Eddy’s objective - though partially guided, like Estes’s, by a response to late 20th century material and techno-culture - was quite different. Eddy, we are coming to understand, was seeking to dissect, to comprehend, and to decode the very nature of picture making both ontologically and on a personal level. His store windows mark a moment of decision to follow the path of the structural breakdown of pictorial elements into smaller and smaller units, to breakdown the integrity of the picture surface and traditional pictorial illusionism, in the pursuit of a profound investigation of the nature of perception, and ultimately of the nature of picture making. His choice to favor panes of glass, and in the later paintings, reflective silverware and ultimately transparent glassware, taken together with his choice to continue to mine fresh and fertile analogies between the materials and scenarios he depicted (rife with reflection, mirroring and ephemera) and the grand illusion of painting are the testimony of a remarkable artistic journey. In 1991, Eddy commented to an interviewer, “I don’t see making art as what I do. I see making art as what you get from what I do.” (Footnote 39) Consideration of Eddy’s objectives for himself and for his viewer triggered recollection of a comment by René Magritte about Giorgio de Chirico: “Chirico was the first to conceive of painting that directly manifests this presence (that of the world of thought) and to evoke its mystery.” (Footnote 40) By the same token, in a recent study on Magritte, Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque noted that Magritte’s “...primary concern was never to serve painting, and aesthetic problems were not at the core of his research. They were only accessories in the service of idea.” In her comment she echoed such enthusiasm for Magritte as expressed by Louis Scutenaire, friend of the artist and intellectual, who published a monograph on Magritte in 1947. Scutenaire avowed that “…thanks to Magritte painting abandons its purpose of entertaining the eye and provoking emotions and begins to help man find himself, find the world.” (Footnote 41)

Fig. 44. René Magritte, The Key to the Fields, (La Clef des champs), 1935, oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm. Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. © 1999 C. Herscovoci, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

To drive this point home, in a painting entitled The Key to the Fields, 1935, Magritte shattered the Albertian pane of glass and window, as a symbol (reverberating the manifestos of his Dada and Surrealist colleagues) of the emancipation of painting from traditional (Renaissance) pictorial space. (Fig. 44) In the fallen, shattered glass that carries fragments of a painted landscape identical to the one revealed through the broken pane, the painting can be read as a direct reference to analogies used by the Renaissance theoretician, Alberti, to describe his concept of an ideal picture surface, which among other things should appear to the eye as if it were a pane of glass or a window. In his treatise On Painting, Alberti advised that when ‘studious’ painters “…fill the circumscribed places with colors, they should only seek to present the forms of things seen on this plane as if it were of transparent glass. Thus the visual pyramid could pass through it, placed at a definite distance with definite lights and a definite position of centre in space and in a definite place in respect to the observer.” Further along in Book One he notes: “I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish, which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint.” (Footnote 42) Alberti’s counsel was codified into what would become the convention for the construction of systematic pictorial illusionism for centuries to come. In a letter of 1967, I believe that Magritte interpreted his painting, The Key to the Fields: “...it so happened that I would suddenly stop painting because I was surprised to exist, to have a living model before me and to feel that seeing “life” was of greater importance than indulging in the pleasures of avant garde art. In 1925, having grown weary of these pleasures, I did not feel that it mattered much to find a new style of painting. For me it was more a question of knowing what had to be painted...”. (Footnote 43) Magritte's comment, directed at the manner in which the painting process heightened in him the sense of existing, gives us pause to reflect, perhaps more seriously, upon Eddy's own ongoing dialogue with ontology as a primary message and focus of his paintings. In The Key to the Fields, Magritte was likely not censuring Alberti directly, but the conventions that had been formulated through the appropriation and obfuscation of the original premise of a centuries old system. In his belief in the higher purpose of painting to inspire thought, Magritte was actually in harmony with the higher motive and goal of Albertian pictorial space - that is edification, especially through narrative with moral purpose. Albertian perspective space was the stage for that narrative. Alberti proclaimed, “The greatest work of the painter is not a colossus, but an istoria.. Istoria gives greater renown to the intellect than any colossus.” (Footnote 44) The istoria advocated by Alberti is directed towards the realization of a new humanist art that would be capable of expressing concepts similar to those of the literary and theological humanists. Like Cicero’s orator, “The istoria will move the soul of the beholder when each man painted there clearly shows the movement of his own soul.” (Footote 45) I have invoked the commentary and reflections of these masters of the distant and not so distant past, as a reminder of the didactic purpose towards which art has often set its course, and which purpose it continues to serve in our later 20th century - not so much to stimulate noble action, but, rather, in its stead, to advance knowledge, to reflect upon the nature of existence, and to give rise to critical thought. Eddy’s purposeful development of his technical innovations was joined hand in hand to his theoretical aims. It was based on a realization that had come to him as a graduate student at the U. of Hawaii. While engaged in course-work for a Ph.D. in art history, he recognized that the modern world, especially the later 20th century, is visually differentiated from the pre-modern by the instrumentation through which it is perceived (to wit the importance of McLuhen’s observations). Technological innovations such as artificial illumination, photographic and tele-communicated imagery, and instantaneous information, had rendered obsolete the chiaroscuro illusionism of traditional realist painting. (Footnote 46) He needed to find a means to create a modern pictorial surface one that in the very fiber of its being would signal contemporaneity to the viewer. Nonetheless, his route to revisions in his technique and the restructuring of his paint surface had its source, oddly enough, in his study of the Renaissance tempera painting technique as an art student. As we have noted, he was fascinated with the hatch marks, little discrete gestures that actually accumulate into a surface, and with the system of cumulative layers that were used to build value. It was not by coincidence that he adopted green as his own first layer. His experiments with it may well have been instigated by his deliberations regarding the choice of green by the 13 and 14th century masters as their first strata, or underground layer. Consideration of these factors set him on the path to developing his own unique system of overlays of pthalocyanine green, burnt sienna and dioxazine purple as a means to build value and to energize color through the vibration of quasi transparent superimposed tonalities. Of course the technical innovations of the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and Cubists had also set the wheels turning. The pleasure in the underlying message here is the recognition of the connective tissue that links past and present in a continuum. Being a highly intuitive, sensitive observer of his environment, Eddy arrived at a system - overlays of diaphanous mesh like layers built up of tiny circles - that, notwithstanding its source of inspiration, uncannily demonstrates extraordinary correspondences with most technically produced modern visual imagery, from offset halftone lithography, and color photography to cinema and television. In each of those modern systems, the image is rendered through a series of minute dots (lithography due to the screen which gives tonality; film - whether belonging to photography or cinema - due to the electron sensitivity of silver halide crystals; television due to the scanning system of the camera and the delivery system of the mask and phosphor sensitive TV screen.) Images produced by all of the above technological systems depend almost entirely, not on linear perspective, but on the sensitivity of the key materials - iodized silver, gels, screens, selenium, etc. - to values of light and dark. These materials are photosensitive, activated by light and processed through the refinement of complex chemical or electronic systems to yield “pictures”. Color film and television depend on suitable combinations of a three color system - blue-violet, green and red, which each cover approximately one third of the visible spectrum - to build the images. It is important to note in this discussion, that Eddy did not arrive at his technical system via the calculated study of these technologies with the intent to translate the principals by which they operate into a pictorial or painted gesture. Yet the proof of his ability to intuit what is elemental in his environment and to embed it in his work is a mark of its timely and timeless (transcendent) qualities. The optical scintillation, vibrant color and key role of light in his paintings has more than met the challenge of approximating the vitality of the technologically produced visual imagery which engulfs us. As we reach the end of the second millennium A.D, his pictures are among the best simulacra of the directions towards which our cognitive and visual powers have been set. In light of our journey of discovery thus far into the mind and work of Don Eddy, it might be appropriate to close this chapter on “Reflections” with some principal dictionary meanings of the word reflect:

1. to throw or bend back (e.g., light) from a surface 2. To form an image of (an object): Mirror 3. To manifest as a result of one’s actions 4. To think or consider carefully; reflection: careful consideration: Meditation.

 

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