Spaightwood Galleries

"I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months. I began to anyway. I guess it took me a couple of years to get rid of that." (Tom Wesselmann on his rejection of abstraction and his embrace of the new thing, Pop Art, in the early 1960s)

"Heroicall [poetry] . . . doeth not onely teache and moove to a truth, but teacheth and mooveth to the most high and excellent truth: who maketh magnanimitie and justice, shine through all mistie fearfulnesse and foggie desires. Who if the saying of Plato and Tully bee true, that who could see vertue, woulde be woonderfullie ravished with the love of her bewtie." (Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie [London, 1595]

Miró began making abstract paintings in the 1920s as Germany began hurtling towards chaos and Spain began its descent into a cataclysmic civil war between those who embraced the modern and those who hated it and wanted to keep to the old ways. In his long series of Elegies to the Spanish Republic (one of which will be in the show), Motherwell lent a gestural touch to the first generation of American Abstract Expressionists (who themselves had been stunned by their first look at Miró's Constellations at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1941) and the second generation of American abstract artists, including Frankenthaler and Mitchell, took off on their own in the next few years. Tàpies, who has written eloquently of the lessons he drew from Miró about the nature of human beings and the inability of political despots to replace the human spirit with the obedience of the machine, moved from Surrealism to the European version of Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, in the late 1940s and was being featured in retrospectives at the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1960s. Our new show, Heroic Poetry: Abstract Art from Miró to the Present, will feature prints by Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Miró, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Antoni Tapies, and, prints and multiples by Louise Nevelson, and pastels and paintings on paper by Jonna Rae Brinkman. The show, which visually suggests that all abstract art is not alike nor is it motivated by similar conceptions on the part of its makers, focuses on the deeply spiritual abstraction of Miró, the lyrical abstraction of Frankenthaler and Mitchell and the gesturalist abstraction of Motherwell, Tàpies, and Brinkman. Jonna Rae Brinkman has been showing at Spaightwood since 1998 and in that brief time has won quite a considerable following (we have sold over 70 of her paintings on canvas and paper) and been the subject of a feature in The Wisconsin State Journal by John Aehl. One of her works has recently been reproduced on the cover of a novel, Scorpion's Kiss by Peter L. Molloy.