Steven
Harvey Fine Art Projects, June 2012
As a former student at “The Gandy Brodie School of Fine Art”
situated in his barn in Newfane VT in 1972, I was of course very pleased to see
this small but comprehensive exhibit, and some overdue recognition of Brodie’s
iconoclastic career. Lets hope more of the estate gets out into the light of
day soon.
This essay is more a remembrance than a review. Please refer
to John Yau’s excellent 2-part review in HyperAllergic for a more concise
review of the SHFAP exhibit.
Indeed, my formative experience as a youthful longhaired
“wheat germ freak” of an artist occurred on a warm summer day in Newfane
Vermont when Gandy invited me into his barn and asked me what I thought one of
his paintings looked like.
Responding “it looks like painting” (duh), I established a niche for myself in the barn, and with a certain wickedly subversive delight Gandy took me under his painterly wing that summer.
Gandy grew up a poor Jew on the Lower East Side and was pretty much self-taught. I believe Gandy prided himself on not being a part of any particular art clique, and made a concerted effort to identify himself as a rogue practitioner of paint. Despite his resistance to networking he managed to gain some notoriety as a product of the Provincetown MA and E 10th St gallery scenes in New York in the 50’s. He knew all the Cedar Bar Ab Ex luminaries of the time, and by the 60’s had met with enough success to move to Vermont and paint in a barn.
Responding “it looks like painting” (duh), I established a niche for myself in the barn, and with a certain wickedly subversive delight Gandy took me under his painterly wing that summer.
Gandy grew up a poor Jew on the Lower East Side and was pretty much self-taught. I believe Gandy prided himself on not being a part of any particular art clique, and made a concerted effort to identify himself as a rogue practitioner of paint. Despite his resistance to networking he managed to gain some notoriety as a product of the Provincetown MA and E 10th St gallery scenes in New York in the 50’s. He knew all the Cedar Bar Ab Ex luminaries of the time, and by the 60’s had met with enough success to move to Vermont and paint in a barn.
An excerpt from the essay I wrote on my web site:
“The barn was his
studio but he also ran a “school” there. Inclusion for a few of us local post
college art kids meant a chance to try out our brushwork around a painterly
guru. Although Gandy was a no-nonsense critic and would let you know in no
uncertain terms if he thought you were painting something crass, he was also a
flower child at heart. His preferred lesson plan for painting from nature was
to get outside with only charcoal and paper, feel your flavor, and assimilate random
marks.”
I was then given marching orders by my mentor to leave the
cushy confines of Brattleboro and move to a “cold water loft” in NYC if I
wanted to be a real artist.
Brodie had a small cult following of former students in NY
where he had also taken a spacious loft on Greene St. I recall watching one of his
large “Astronaut” paintings take shape on Greene St before the Smithsonian
acquired it. This heavily armored and painted figure still managed to drift
weightlessly in the orgone void. (Brodie was a disciple of Wilhelm Reich and
encouraged all his students to get naked and sit in the orgone box. I
participated in Orgone therapy with Dr Sobey, a Reichian trained therapist on E 9th
St, but it was never deemed necessary for me to enter the dank looking
contraption about the size of a phone booth)
Gandy was prone to painting over his canvases for a period
of years. I recall watching a self-portrait evolve over a period of years into
a painting of an icicle. It was so encrusted with impasto that it must have
been several inches thick.
Gandy’s sublime gift was an otherworldly ability to imbue his art with a truly transcendent sensation of tangible psyche. You could look
at a simple painting of a small sailboat floating in a sea of monochromatic
pigment that was like being inside of his brain as it dreamed of painting the
sailboat.
His uncanny ability to make paintings as an extension of
self was a primarily a sensually physical act that ended up as a pictorial
version of his body reinvented as scenes from nature.
In particular his “Birth of a Fawn” series epitomized this
process of transference; to quote John Yau: “At the heart of Brodie’s’s worldview is a profound understanding of
neglect and solitariness”.
There were also the “Dead Bird” and “Falling Tree” themes, all
worthy of his best work.
I think the sense of fragile decay and the inevitability of
entropy in his painting stemmed from a dichotomy of sensation rooted in his
pictorial narrative. He always warned his students to be wary of sentimental
content, and to avoid sentimentality by embracing an authentic motif of native
experience. Simplicity vs simplistic.
Gandy was actually somewhat intolerant of most contemporary
art. He was not particularly interested in intellectual investigation. He found
abstract art generally lacking the impetus of pictorial substance found in
Cezanne, Corbet, and other artists that worked representionally from nature.
Near the end of life Gandy seemed depressed, I remember
hanging out with him in SoHo one afternoon, his eyes were wells of painfully
agonizingly awareness. He knew he was sick, and had always suffered from a
psyche wracked by insecurity and uncertainty. I guess you could say he wore his
heart on his sleeve, you knew when he was enjoying life and when it was
tormenting him.
But that’s why he was such a great mentor and teacher. His
lessons and art were interchangeable, and the wealth of artistic mores and
completely non-cynical career orientation his students gained were invaluable.
Nobody who knew Gandy ever left feeling like he didn’t give the most of
himself; and you were always the better for it.
Brodie collapsed and died on the sidewalk from heart failure
after visiting his art dealer in 1975.
(Sorry I don't have captions for all of these. Please contact SHFAP as most were in his show)
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| City Tree |
 |
Anemonie in Rusted Can
Mixed media on paper
1975
|
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| Astronaut |
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