Jack Youngerman: Free-Form Abstractionist
"It has to be a really ill wind that doesn't blow somebody some good."
Jack Youngerman, pacing around a phalanx of numinous wooden sculptures, was talking of World War II and the G.I. Bill, which enabled him to go to Paris and become a painter.
"Just as the war brought America out of the doldrums of the Depression and woke up the whole spirit of the country, so to me and my contemporaries it gave the impetus for change and the means to achieve it."
"You have to be fatalistic about the good and bad things that happen," he continued. "I'm sure I would have taken up art, but my life would have been different, my art would have been different."
Born To Poverty
But the thought lay unspoken that he might not, in fact, have managed to escape the vise of poverty and manual labor he was born into in Kentucky in 1926.
"Growing up was difficult and extremely confining. My only contact with a wider world was a little AM radio. There was no intellectual input from my family - it was as if people who had no choice but to go to work after high school just shut down their possibilities."
Fortunately, in those days lives were still changed by the town library. By reading the great Russian and European novelists, Mr. Young erman discovered there was more to the world than Louisville, Ky.
A Larger World
The war allowed him to see it. While serving in the Navy the artist saw his first painting, in the National Museum in Washington, and had his first glimpse of contemporary art.
This, he knew, was what he wanted.
But other returning G.I.s thought the same, and at the war's end the art schools in New York City were fully booked. So, the ill-wind metaphor still holding good, Mr. Youngerman went to Paris.
"Paris was my education," he said. "I learned French, I read French," and he immersed himself in the world of art.
Postwar Paris
"But it wasn't just seeing and learning about art," he said. "It was the whole intellectual climate of Paris after the war - Sartre, de Beauvoir - and it was about encountering ideas that went against one's culture and nature. Afterward, you moved on, but your mind had been opened."
Mr. Youngerman stayed in Paris for nine years, exhibited his paintings ("prematurely, I think") at Galerie Maeght, married, and had a son.
In the mid-1950s, the New York City art dealer and gallery owner Betty Parsons visited his studio.
"She looked around for 10 minutes and then said, 'Okay, I'll give you a show - but you have to move back to New York.' "
Crucial Decision
Mr. Youngerman was aware this was a decision that was going to change his life. He had barely enough money to buy one-way tickets to New York for himself and his family. Once there, they would have to stay.
"My level of personal stress when I first came to New York was so great that it lent a kind of urgency to my paintings that people appreciated," he said.
Among the first people he went to visit on his arrival was Ellsworth Kelly, who had been a friend in Paris. Kelly was living in the old Coenties Slip neighborhood by the Staten Island Ferry, and Mr. Youngerman soon joined the growing community of artists there, including Robert Indiana, Fred Mitchell, and Agnes Martin.
Family Breakup
"It was a bit romantic," he said, "a little bit heroic."
But in those days, city building inspectors were not sympathetic to lofts. Eventually the artists were evicted and the buildings were torn down.
At the same time, Mr. Youngerman's marriage to the actress Delphine Seyrig (of "Last Year at Marienbad" fame) was coming undone. His family returned to France.
Free-Form Abstraction
Abstract Expressionism was at its height. "The big thing for my generation was the bursting open of the possibilities of non-representational art," said the artist. "It was in there that most everybody sought their way."
But although he admired constructivist abstraction and was influenced by what was going on around him in the city, he did not, he said, feel entirely part of it, attracted as he was by a more free-form abstraction.
"And, with ups and downs and inconsistencies, that is where I have groped my way."
"Sixteen Americans"
Mr. Youngerman remained with the Betty Parsons gallery for 14 years and in the winter of 1959-60 was included by Dorothy Miller in the influential group show "Sixteen Americans," with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Mr. Kelly, and others.
The Guggenheim Museum gave him a retrospective in 1986.
"Professionalism is like a swamp you can drown in very easily," he said. "It's impossible not to become professional once you begin selling and being reviewed, and it's hard to hold on to the freshness of youth."
"First you have to deal with no success, and then you have to deal with 'success,' which is harder. Even a little can make you complacent and take away that edge you need to work well."
Austerity
That he has always hewn close to the line of abstraction, Mr. Youngerman attributes to the austerity of his Protestant upbringing. It is no coincidence, he thinks, that Catholic countries such as Italy, where artists are exposed from childhood to the gold and polychrome splendors and emotionally charged imagery of Baroque churches, have not produced the leading abstract painters.
"There was no imagery in our church," he said. "Just three words - 'God Is Love' - and some hymn numerals."
"There are two limits I have put on myself," he added, "and that is that the work should be, one, non-representational, and two, free-form. In everything else - surface, color, or edge - I don't limit myself at all."
Turned To Sculpture
In his early painting, Mr. Youngerman did limit himself - to two or three colors and stark, pared-down shapes.
This gave the work its quality, he believes, but also imposed a difficulty. Eventually he came to feel he could move no further in that medium.
Seeking other ways of working, he turned to sculpture.
A successful show of his latest work, an installation of stacked and laminated wooden sculptures, has just closed at the Joan T. Washburn Gallery in Manhattan. As arranged in the gallery, the pieces form a grove of spiraling, twisting, helical forms, each of which complements the next.
Not What But How
While at first glance the forms are rhythmical and straightforward, on a second look they are impenetrable, sensual, and mysterious. The immediate question that springs to the untutored mind is not What, but How.
Mr. Youngerman does all his sculpture in his studio on Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton, where he can work outside to avoid dust. He depends on his friend and neighbor Warren Padula, an architect, designer, woodworker, and photographer, to make the basic modules in his shop.
"I'm not a craftsman myself, nor particularly interested in crafts," Mr. Youngerman said, explaining that the quality of the wood was not the point; he works in plywood as much as in mahogany.
The Method
Wooden blanks - squares, figure eights, X's - are stacked on a rod, rotated to achieve the right form, and then glued into place. The rod is removed. After that, Mr. Youngerman sands the form to achieve its final shape.
Even when the method is explained, it is still hard to believe that "Redwood Point," for instance (second from the right in the photo), was created from a stack of rotated squares.
The Washburn show seems to have acted as a catharsis for Mr. Youngerman, who now feels that he might return to painting.
"I see painting again - its possibilities - that I lost sight of there for a while."
Trip To India
The artist and his companion, Hilary Helfant, also an artist, were about to leave last week for Ahmedabad in India, where he will work with local materials, such as brick or stone, and local craftsmen.
His maquettes were packed and ready to go and he seemed stimulated by the prospect - they would stay for a month, he said, but longer if the work takes off.
Gazing out the window of the small red barn that is his studio, across flat fields where horses were running, he looked more youthful than his 71 years.
"Rilke said, 'Work as if you had all eternity ahead of you.' "
Mr. Youngerman obviously follows that advice.