Jules
Kirschenbaum: The Need to Dream of Some
Transcendent Meaning
by Thomas
Worthen
The University of Iowa Museum of Art,
Iowa City IA, 2006
132 pp. $29.99
ISBN: 087414155-9.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art
University of Northern Iowa
Website: <www.bobolinkbooks.com
ballast@netins.net
This is a beautiful exhibition catalog,
with a clearly written analysis of a memorable,
posthumous showing of the lifework of
a painter named Jules Kirschenbaum (1930-2000).
The exhibition was held at the University
of Iowa Museum of Art from September 17
through December 2006. For those of us
who knew the artist, the show was a somber,
disturbing farewell, a still-too-soon
reminder that Jules had died prematurely
from cancer more than six years ago, at
an age when he might have continued to
work for several more decades. As evidenced
by the installation and (now) by the full-color
plates in this book, he had always been
a rara avis, an artist who had
set his sights on an uncompromising level
of achievement, regardless of what was
in fashion in the fleeting so-called "world
of art." Among the most interesting
aspects of this volume is the transcript
of a talk he gave in 1987 at Drake University
in Des Moines (where he taught painting
for many years, and, for a shorter period,
was also the department head). That transcript
teems with ideas that are as rich in detail
and suggestion as are Jules’ paintings,
as when he says that "Wittgenstein
said that sometimes an expression has
to be withdrawn from language and sent
out for cleaning, then it can be put back
into circulation again. That’s how
I feel about contemporary art…In
a time like ours when self-expression
has become ridiculously simpleminded,
as artists accept anything that comes
of themselves as valuable, I would like
to send all the clichés of modernism
out for cleaning." When I first saw
Kirschenbaum’s paintings in 1985,
I could easily sense his antipathy toward
the thinness of what now poses as art,
self-expression, art history and theory.
As the author of the essay states, virtually
everything Kirschenbaum touched was "skillful,
intelligent, evocative, and intense."
That said, if this is the sole (and definitive)
book on his astonishing artwork, we should
all be greatly saddened: As insightful
as this catalog is, his paintings are
so complex, so extraordinary, that they
deserve far more discussion, and one can
hope this is just the beginning of a new
(albeit posthumous) look at his concerns
and accomplishments.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Volume 21 Number
1, Autumn 2007.)
