Just Call Him ‘Mr. Chips of the Art World’

The faded words “Learn to Fly” emblazon the Santa Monica Airport Quonset hut where Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe rents his studio. Standing in the doorway, he blinks his pale eyes as though vaguely astonished to see a visitor. With his short-cropped hair and wire glasses, he resembles the British military officer he might have become. Instead, as a painter and critic, he organizes battles of an aesthetic nature.

Next month, Gilbert-Rolfe, who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting last year, will show five new paintings at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in his first solo exhibition locally since his 1990 show at ACE Gallery. Gilbert-Rolfe, 53, accepts the rarity of this occasion with the cynicism of the seasoned veteran who has shown his work at galleries in Europe and America for three decades.

He is less reserved about the fact that a collection of his writing “Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986-1993,” published by Cambridge University Press, last year won the esteemed Frank Jewett Mather Award, presented by the College Art Assn. for distinction in art criticism. “I’m thrilled to bits,” says Gilbert-Rolfe. “I can resist anything but flattery. It was gratifying because a lot of people hate my writing.”

In the book, Gilbert-Rolfe makes his arguments concisely and with fury, showing little patience for the Neo-Conceptualism practiced by younger artists. “We have an academicism in contemporary art,” he snaps. “I compared the Conceptual art show at MOCA [“Reconsidering the Object of Art,” 1995] to the academy of [17th century French painter Charles] Le Brun. It has rules, a set of agreed-upon theories, and ways one may approach them. Most of what we see in the galleries is not art, but a kind of socio-anthropology. If people want to start with an idea, maybe it would be more interesting if it wasn’t all the same band of ideas. The trouble is that an idea is already complete. Only [Conceptual artist] John Baldessari had the genius to start with a bad idea. Then you can do something with it.”

Art critic Dave Hickey calls Gilbert-Rolfe “one of the few critics working today who manages to combine scholarly rigor, intellectual acuity, journalistic pugnacity and a real understanding of the practice of art.”

Asked if his extensive writings inform his painting, Gilbert-Rolfe glares at the vast, colorful canvases in his studio as if demanding an answer from them. “If I had a clear sense of how the writing and painting fed off of one another, it would mess both of them up. I would never make a painting about something that I would write about,” he says.

Gilbert-Rolfe has made abstract work since his 1974 show of works on paper at the Bertha Urdang Gallery in New York. In that show, some works were painted on both sides of the paper, some borrowed from magazines. Afterward, he thought the show was “substituting criticality for art,” so he renewed his commitment to painting.

“The one thing I can’t really put up with in art is simplicity,” he says. “I wanted to make minimally complex paintings, but I can’t stand monochromes. I agree with Clement Greenberg that it never starts to become a painting, it’s just reduction. It doesn’t want to be two panels, because it’s just symmetry. It doesn’t want to be three because of all that stuff about three that lurks in the culture in an unpleasant way.” Gilbert-Rolfe chose four panels and began a series of grid-like paintings composed of colored squares. Over the years, they grew larger and more complex, with titles alluding to history or philosophy.

In an era when abstract works are often left untitled, Gilbert-Rolfe provides challenging names for each of his canvases. “Order, Uncertainty, Movement, Decisiveness,” in the show, roughly describes painted moments on the picture’s royal blue surface. “Barnett Newman said it was cowardly not to title paintings,” opines Gilbert-Rolfe. “It was evading a responsibility.”

The artist has pursued art criticism and essay writing since a fortuitous evening in 1973 at SoHo’s Broome Street Bar. “At that time, [critic] Robert Pincus-Witten was reviews editor for Artforum. I was saying to him, ‘Why do you have these imbeciles write for you?’ He said, ‘Well, darling, if you think you can do any better . . . . ‘ And that is how I started to write.” His interest in serious cultural observations led him to co-found the left-leaning arts publication October with Lucio Pozzi, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson in New York in 1976, but he quit after three issues had been produced. “The chemistry was all wrong,” he tactfully explains.

Gilbert-Rolfe was born in Tunbridge Wells, England, in 1945. “England in the ‘50s was all gray or brown. Gray skies, gray suits, brown food, brown landscape,” he says. “Excepting the time when the sun comes out and it all looks like Winnie-the-Pooh land.” He adds that the A.A. Milne book was written 10 miles from his birthplace. His parents met in the Air Force and married during the war, divorcing when he was 6. “Two sides of the class system were represented in my parents’ marriage, so I have always had some sense of how those differences operate,” Gilbert-Rolfe says. As a result, at 11, he declined education in the private schools favored by his father’s side of the family and chose state schools. “I became wedded to the idea of meritocracy at an early age,” he says. “The idea of going to a school with all these people who were paying and therefore not guaranteed to be smart was not attractive to me.”

Despite an early inclination to follow the family traditions of attending university then entering the military service and the diplomatic corps, he rebelled at 14, embraced “left-wingery” and later declined university in favor of art school at Tunbridge Wells. He drew and painted from the figure for four years, doing his thesis on portrait painting. “I lost interest in doing figurative work after I lost interest in the psychological as a subject for painting. I got caught up in what happens in front of your face while you are painting.”

Turning toward “Ghost,” a wall-sized painting of varied white and yellow marks marching in bands across the surface, he says, “Part of it reminds me of a still life I painted while still in art school that was all about reflected light on a white tablecloth. What interests me in painting is space as a force, not space as an emptiness around some figure.”

Gilbert-Rolfe completed a graduate degree at London University in 1967 and then came to the United States to attend Florida State University.

“I had wanted to come to America since, at 17, I’d seen a big, red Barnett Newman painting at the Tate Gallery’s show ‘Art U.S.A. Now.’ I realized I’d never seen that much space in a painting in Europe, and I should go take a look at the place where it was made,” he says.

At Florida State, Gilbert-Rolfe studied aesthetics with influential philosopher Eugene Kaelin, but after two years abandoned the idea of a PhD and headed to Manhattan in 1970. “I never meant to stay in America. I couldn’t imagine putting up with the right-wingery. But in America you can actually do what you thought you might want to do, without having to be a member of a certain club, not having to have elaborate introductions to people. Those things made me a convert very quickly.”

Gilbert-Rolfe’s first wife, Jennifer, however, did not share his enthusiasm and, with his first son, Cyrus, moved back to England in 1973. In 1979, Gilbert-Rolfe married Genevieve, an American; his second son, Cedric, was born in 1987. After teaching at Princeton University during the ‘70s, Gilbert-Rolfe was invited by Baldessari to teach for a semester at California Institute of the Arts in 1980. His wife decided to complete her graduate degree in the history program at UCLA so they stayed on, and Gilbert-Rolfe taught full time at CalArts until 1986, when he moved to Art Center College of Design, where he is coordinator of the graduate programs for fine art and critical writing. He has now lived in L.A. longer than anywhere else. Yet, he says, “I still don’t know where anything is.”

After 30 years of teaching, he ruefully calls himself the “Mr. Chips of the art world.” He admits it’s integral. “I get to theorize and talk through ideas that I wouldn’t necessarily work through so carefully if I wasn’t being paid to do it in front of 20 students,” he says. “A lot of those ideas recur in my writing. How they feed back into the painting is a bit more slippery for me.”

“Writing is much easier for me than painting,” he confesses. “If it can be conceptualized, I’d just as soon have it in prose. Painting would have to be about the things that you couldn’t write.”

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is a frequent contributor to Calendar.

‘The one thing I can’t really put up with in art is simplicity. I wanted to make minimally complex paintings, but I can’t stand monochromes.’

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

JEREMY GILBERT-ROLFE, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., B-1, Santa Monica. Dates: Opens Sept. 12. Tuesdays to Fridays, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Saturdays,11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Ends Oct. 17. Phone: (310) 453-7535.