To coincide with Elliott Puckette’s recent solo exhibition at the gallery, Unfolding, The Kasmin Review shares the late curator David Anfam's essay on the artist, titled "Writing is the Painting of the Voice.” In the text, Anfam discusses Puckette’s work in relation to the art historical sources that have informed her signature use of the line, including the interlacing compositions of Jackson Pollock and the elegant intricacies of the Old Masters. The following text was printed in the first comprehensive monograph on Elliott Puckette, published by Kasmin Books in 2022.
“A certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”(1) —Baldassare Castiglione
“Thanks to the oval I have discovered the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical.”(2) —Georges Braque
“I like the immediacy of drawing”(3) —Elliott Puckette
From at least the distant past associated with ancient Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus, Zeno of Elea and Aristotle onward, Western thought has considered continuity and change to be time’s twin essences, albeit often a paradoxical pair. So we could do worse than return, via Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner, to my exhibition Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2016–17. There, Krasner’s climactic achievement defied gender stereotypes. In The Eye Is the First Circle (1960) she boldly confronted her husband’s machismo poured in paint and mythicized through his public persona, proving herself a first among equals. Likewise, early one morning at the RA I held my breath as art handlers unpacked a crate from Jerusalem.(4) Out of it came an extraordinarily narrow, long canvas. Marveling at Jackson’s minuscule tracery only made Lee’s big slicing brushstrokes seem the more imperious. What do these musings have to do with Elliott Puckette? Everything and nothing.
Nothing, because Puckette’s pictorial dynamics feel like the antithesis to those that her two Abstract Expressionist predecessors respectively made their own. Nowhere do Puckette’s arabesques and serpentine rhythms intersect with Krasner’s brutish arcs and circles. Nor do they mesh with Pollock’s itsy-bitsy, touchy-feely — meant in the most complimentary way — skeins. Over and again, Puckette replaces explosive energy with taut elegance. Elegance? Here, the lurking gender issue that our current zeitgeist demands of all and sundry needs dispelling without further ado.
If Krasner’s expressive ferocity (and feisty personality) arose partly from her combat or agon with Jackson, then ‘masculinity’ and its challenges — a woman’s bid to outdo her husband’s ghost — must have been a factor. On a similar note, the innocent eye might wonder whether Puckette’s ostensibly gentle, even at moments frail, pictorial twists somehow convey ‘femininity’? No. Their tenor is singular, not flypapered to any ‘male/female’ blueprint (to echo a 1940s Pollock title). Preparing for my first encounter with the artist and mindful of her roots in Kentucky and Tennessee, I thought about the movie Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara, Southern belles, and so forth. Instead, Puckette came across as thoughtful, precise, concise, and, guiding me through her strategies, a shrewd pictorial tactician. As a 2020 Puckette title states, she ‘goes it alone’.(5) And to rephrase an old adage, le style, c’est la femme,(6) the artist and her art soon felt of a piece. The work tempers capriciousness with gravitas, even an austerity. A double entendre is irresistible: Puckette knows where to draw the line.
In Puckette’s scheme, line conquers all. This remains the single, prime exception that proves the rule to an otherwise temptingly obvious mismatch with Pollock and, to a lesser extent, Krasner (for whom color held greater import).(7) No matter what the ink hue Puckette chooses to tint her gessoed grounds — ranging from subfusc purples and blue through grisaille to a loud rose madder — their mood stays cool, in the literal and figurative senses. It is somewhat as though these swirling iterations had been done, so to speak, with the left hand (Puckette is right-handed anyway), intimating a certain fancy-free, almost nonchalant ease. Yet be not deceived. Such simplicity is complex, requiring art’s artifice. Draftsmanship lays bare the hand and mind behind it, even as its suavity may conceal them.(8) Why does Puckette limit herself to this graphic medium?
‘I like the immediacy of drawing’, Puckette remarks, ‘that it’s almost a verb’.(9) Her thought strikes to the heart of the matter. To quote another contemporary artist much concerned with the subject, ‘Line drawings manifest a particular rigour and economy, as though the eye and the mind of the artist was [sic] truly concentrated at that tiny point of contact between the marker and the surface — the pen or pencil or brush or paper. They range from the sensual to the severe, they are not indulgent. At their most severe, they do not lack feeling.’(10) Michael Craig-Martin’s description might almost be, unwittingly, tailored for Puckette. These gyrations at once emanate severity and sensuality. The former stems from their sparseness and near-monochrome palette; the latter from their artisanal facture. Now the analogy with Pollock hits the proverbial nail on the head.
Barring a few departures, Pollock’s technique was additive. That is, his poured enamels accumulated into strata, palimpsests. Puckette’s methods are the exact opposite. She reserves her layerings for the support itself, either wood for smaller pictures or aluminium (sanded so that it has a ‘tooth’ to hold the subsequent kaolin mixture) bonded to wood for larger pieces. Upon these, goes the gesso emulsion in as many as twelve layers. Thereafter, everything is subtractive, incised with an ordinary implement, a razor blade. Pollock wielded such a blade only on rare occasions (at least beyond the bath room) when he excised segments from the image, as in Out of the Web (1949). Also, his friend, the maverick Italian-American Conrad Marca-Relli, used razors to slice the canvas overlays that comprise his collage-paintings.(11) Actual or hypothetical, the implement connotes violence (Gian Lorenzo Bernini infamously slashed his mistress with a razor). Not, however, in Puckette’s hands. There, it conveys agility, virtuosity and felicity. In the process, this dexterity lands the artist in a new, hybrid category: the engraving painter. True, sgraffito is a technique dating to classical times and subsequently burgeoned in architecture during the Renaissance. Throughout the modern era, many instances that entail scraping and scratching spring to mind: among them Max Ernst’s grattage and Mark Tansey’s meticulous removal of pigment to shape his figurative fantasias. Nevertheless, Puckette’s outlook is sui generis, a contemporary law unto itself. She draws out of paint.
In Puckette’s scheme, line conquers all.
Traditionally, engraving represented a device to transcribe easel or larger pictures, murals and so forth into reproductions. Eventually it segued into the Liber Studiorum recording an artist’s corpus (specifically J. M. W. Turner’s, himself following Claude Lorrain’s Liber Veritas) to disseminate it to a larger market. Turner’s efforts were the culmination of a far more venerable lineage involving creative incisions. In a nutshell, it dates back some 500,000 years to the patterns on a chiseled shell found in Java, Indonesia. For our purposes, the relatively recent development of printmaking — encompassing woodcuts, engravings, etchings, and so forth — from the Renaissance onward is the most relevant precursor. Now Pollock & Co. (and with no disrespect to Krasner) fade as Puckette foregrounds her true muses. Before addressing this area, an excursus is pertinent.
Line is loaded – on the visual, semantic, ethical, existential levels, and more beside. Firstly, it calls space into existence and, hence life itself. Witness Philip Guston’s modern biblical equation between Yahweh and the painter, where the shadow-like line may also hint at the mythic genesis of drawing in the act of tracing a shadow.(12) In his archeological investigation into line, the anthropologist Tim Ingold begins: “What do walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling, drawing and writing have in common? The answer is they all proceed along lines of one kind or another…. As walking, talking and gesticulating creatures, human beings generate lines wherever they go.”(13) Musical notation starts in Greek Antiquity. Modern melodic lines constitute its fruition. The noted nineteenth-century German architect Gottfried Semper postulated that threading, twisting and knotting fibers ranked among the most ancient human arts.(14) Is it coincidence that Puckette’s lineation parallels these verbs? Hardly.
Secondly, lines possess moral dimensions. Suffice it to mention that ‘to go straight’, ‘straighten things out’, ‘draw a line’ (as a human imperative), ‘cross a line’ (ditto) and similar phrases denote ethical decisions. Their artistic apotheosis was Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s dictum: “Drawing is the probity of art.”(15) Running through Puckette’s oeuvre to date, her spartan calligraphy exudes a comparable aura, as if she were outlining hitherto unseen visual verities. This impression explains the slightly wondrous air about these curves, squiggles, turns, twists, leaps and knots, in which mathematicians have discovered a hidden order (‘knot theory’).(16) If Puckette’s beguiling patterns skirt the decorative, they do so in the sober manner that drives the human impulse to find regularity and purpose in nature (reproductions of tree studies by various Western and Eastern artists adorn her studio wall).(17) Fractal structure, real or implicit, appears to lurk too in the lines’ evolving repetitions. Puckette’s recourse to the tondo and oval formats with their inherent compositional equipoise amplifies this balanced side to her erstwhile meandering sensibility. For make no mistake, she is au fond a seeker. A title offers a cue/clue to this exploratory urge. Said Farer to Fearer references W. H. Auden’s early verse, the last of his ‘Five Songs’, which recasts the Anglo-Saxon poem, ‘The Wanderer’. Auden’s dual voices – for which we could well read, mindful of Puckette’s graphic dialectic, point and line – start with the question, ‘“O where are you going?” said reader to rider’. The dialogue ends in suspension:
‘Out of this house’ — said rider to reader,
‘Yours never will’ — said farer to fearer,
‘They’re looking for you’ — said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.(18)
Mutatis mutandis, Puckette’s traceries hang in the air suspended. To invoke the twentieth-century Austrian philosopher of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein, they point rather than show.(19) Simply put, instead of resting, they lead to sites indefinite or unknown. Line as journey and gerund.
Third, even indecipherable scripts imply narrative. Thus the term ‘story line’, the fact that narrative begins with boundary crossers(20) and the truism, ‘a line is a point in motion’. To quote Puckette, ‘I remember once looking over my brother’s shoulder as he was writing a longhand equation. It looked as if he were writing a letter and it reminded me of being a small child, trying to copy my mother’s longhand. It was incomprehensible, yet its form was beautiful, and it looked as if it felt really good to me. I wanted to emulate the form.’(21) As it happens, some of the first English novels were emulated successive epistles. For example, Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87). The title Said Farer to Fearer joins others that have a writerly bent, among them A Love Letter, Confessional and On a Limb. Who goes out on a limb if not a narrator? In this field, perhaps Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) has an especially striking correspondence with Puckette’s stylistics. In vivid intervals that equate to emotional states, Sterne’s experimental printed text segues to a marbled page, a blank page, a page of lines to show the book’s plot and, most memorably, abstract curls and loops to express exuberance or gestures.(22) The indexical look of writing counts more for Sterne and Puckette rather than its legibility.(23) The French philosopher Voltaire affirmed this view: ‘Writing is the painting of the voice’.(24) Why? One reason is that the line is a pledge of truth.(25) How else to explain why signatures (manual or cyber-generated) and pens themselves(26) still live when we are otherwise deep into the increasingly dehumanized Digital Age? Handwriting is inseparable from flourishes. Witness the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition: ‘Flourish: 4.b. In Penmanship, a decoration about a letter or writing, consisting of flowing curves executed with a sweep of the pen.’ The leitmotif in Puckette’s syntax is the flowing curve.
Without plumbing the vast, often clichéd literature on biomorphism and the ‘curves of life’ etcetera, Sterne’s eighteenth-century climate yields a crisper connection to Puckette’s vision. Namely, the painter and engraver William Hogarth’s aesthetics. In his Analysis of Beauty (1752) Hogarth opposed straight lines – Puckette of course eschews them like the plague, save for the faint vertical striations in her inky grounds – to curved and serpentine lines. The former reflect banality, whereas the latter fulfil axioms of natural and artistic beauty.(27) Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty’ performs variously as a ‘waving line’, a ‘winding line’ and ‘the line of grace’.(28) A fortiori, Puckette’s pirouettes are performative, indeed balletic. Looping the loop, which Puckette does with superb variety and apparent kinaesthetic speed, is an act inseparable from a performer and a concomitant audience. Therein lies the immediacy that she prizes (see the final epigraph, above).
The leitmotif in Puckette’s syntax is the flowing curve.
In essence, loops synthesize the horizontal and the vertical. Just as Pollock’s most epic performances tended toward a panoramic horizontality (‘I have a definite feeling for the West: the vast horizontality of the land, for instance’ [29]), Puckette maintains a poise between the two poles.(30) This equilibrium invites a final nod to modernism. Georges Braque encapsulated the equation when he declared, ‘Thanks to the oval I have discovered the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical.’ Puckette’s oval boards – she was preparing another on my second visit to her studio – and the overarching, choreographed linearity manifest this spatial torsion to a tee. The same applies to the lemniscate (the algebraic symbol for infinity, ∞) or “lazy eight” curve. Braque explores it even in a deceptively modest still-life and augmented the ellipses that morph into his great late ‘Studio’ series, where line plays further hide-and-seek with planarity. Tacitly, Puckette inherits this ludic intrigue: ‘There is something insane about agonizing over the placement of a line. So when I started making continuous line paintings, I treated it like a game. I’d find the beginning in the end like a snail biting its tail.’(31) She shadow boxes with surface and torqued depth, melding change and continuity. Tranquility and tension coexist. Overall, grace is the name of the game. Like Jan Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela swaying upon the river-realm of the underworld in his tone poem of the same name (1895),(32) her luminous lines — painstakingly cut and re-scored(33) — float over dark depths in a mix of light, shade and sinuosity. Definition mingles with the indefinite. Where have we seen these element in play before? In the multifarious tendency known as Mannerism.
Pondering Puckette’s observations while surveying her ambient workplace made it clear (to me at least) that her most cherished touchstone is not the Pollock-Krasner-Abstract Expressionism nexus that began this essay. It is the Old Masters. Certainly, Pollock did tondos. Nevertheless, they remain a prerogative of the Italian Renaissance. Consider Sandro Botticelli’s tondos with their depictive contours emulating that of the format, Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo (c. 1507) and Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait caught as in a convex mirror.(34) Add to this Puckette’s admiring references to Peter Paul Rubens, Gianbattista Tiepolo, Bernini, Rembrandt van Rijn’s intricate etchings and John Constable’s cloud studies.(35) Complete the formula with the artist’s special praise for Corregio’s Jupiter and Io… and the sum total approximates Mannerism, broadly defined.
In Correggio,(36) alongside the key Mannerists Parmigianino and Pontormo, winding vectors allied to a flattened spatial arena establish a beautiful marriage of intricacy and ease. Likewise, Puckette’s swirls feel effortless. The Italians have a word for this stylishness, the art that conceals art’s challenges: sprezzatura. Baldassare Castiglione coined it – see the first epigraph to this essay(37) — and epitomized the Mannerist preoccupation with studied elegance. Indeed, Raphael portrayed the courtier in these very terms. Raphael’s grisaille evinces the shady tonalities that Parmigianino unprecedently gave to his earth/sky setting in The Deposition from the Cross (1525–28) and which Corregio’s Jupiter, figured as numinous cloud, shares. Centuries later, Puckette’s tenebrous atmospheres uphold the same charged neutrality, offsetting her linea serpentinata’s contrapposto. Supremely, as the phenomenon’s most brilliant historian wrote, ‘Mannerism should, by tradition, speak a silver-tongued language of articulate, if unnatural, beauty… it is, in a phrase, the stylish style.’(38) So is Puckette’s. ‘Beauty is very hard to describe because it’s ever-changing’, said Puckette shortly before I left her studio for the yuppified yet still gritty streets of Dumbo beneath the ugly Manhattan Bridge.(39) It was as good, terse and eloquent an envoi as any.(40)
Elliott Puckette
2023
Kasmin Books
Hardcover
Texts by David Anfam, Stephanie Cristello, Maya Lin, and an artist interview
Elliott Puckette’s first major monograph is replete with color plates, reproduced source materials, and François Halard’s photography of the artist’s studio. Her works are positioned in relation to the art historical sources that have informed her signature use of the line—including Henri Michaux, Jackson Pollock, and the Old Masters.
Credits
Artwork © Elliott Puckette; Text © Art Ex Ltd 2022; Elliott Puckette’s studio in Brooklyn, 2024. Photo: Charlie Rubin; Correggio, Jupiter and Io, c. 1530. Photo: Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie.
Notes
(1) Baldassare Castiglione, transl. Charles S. Singleton, The Book of the Courtier (New York: W.W. Norton, [1528], 2002), p. 32.
(2) Georges Braque, in Michel Seuphor, Abstract Painting (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1964), p. 39.
(3) ‘Elliott Puckette: Life and Opinions’ (2020).
(4) The Pollock had only ever been on public display once before and, unusually, I had never seen it in the original.
(5) Although the connection is fortuitous, this title me think of Larry Poons’s similarly confessional or performative ones.
(6) The aphorism ‘le style c’est l’homme stems from an address that Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-88) gave to the Académie française (August 25, 1753).
(7) An overlap does exist in Krasner’s preoccupation during the 1940s and after with calligraphies, alphabets, and the like.
(8) The relevant magnum opus here is Deanna Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010). Petherbridge regards drawing as ‘the basis of all art and visual thinking’ (p. 2). A comparably erudite survey is David Rosand, Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
(9) Elliott Puckette artist portfolio, courtesy of Kasmin.
(10) Michael Craig-Martin, Drawing the Line (London: Hayward Gallery, 1999), p. 10.
(11) See David Anfam, ‘Conrad Marca-Relli – Ben Marcato’, in Conrad Marca-Relli: Il Maestro Irascible (Milan and Rome: Skira Editore and Mattia de Luca, 2022), n.p.
(12) Significantly, Yahweh’s origins lie in the early Iron Age and, beyond the ancient Israelites, the deity also often appears in Greco-Roman magical texts. Pliny the Elder, reprised by the so-called first art historian, Giorgio Vasari, identified art’s origins with tracing a shadow.
(13) Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 1.
(14) Gottfried Semper, transl. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herman, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1860], 1989), p. 254.
(15) Henri Delaborde, Ingres, sa vie, ses travaux, sa doctrine: D’apres les notes manuscrites et les lettres du maitre (Paris: H. Plon, 1870).
(16) Colin C. Adams, The Knot Book. An Elementary Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Knots (New York: W. H. Freedman, 1994).
(17) See the gestalt theory-based logic underpinning E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order. A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1984).
(18) Auden, ‘Five Songs, V’ (1932), in W. H. Auden: Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 48. Walter de la Mare’s best-known poem, ‘The Listeners’ (1912), posits a near-identical aporia. Tellingly, Auden selected and wrote the Introduction to A Choice of de la Mare’s Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1963).
(19) For an analysis of this ultimately ontological distinction, see Martin Pulido, ‘The Place of Saying and Showing In Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Some Later Works’, Aporia 19 (2009), pp. 11–32.
(20) Tony Tanner, Adultery in the European Novel (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) and Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy. On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1979).
(21) See note 9.
(22) The entire text is available from Project Gutenberg.
(23) A thorough account is Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Writing (London: Reaktion Books, 2001).
(24) Voltaire, in Fischer 2001, p. 294.
(25) Cf. Ian Stewart, Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
(26) Feeling that with old age I had sacrificed my writerly touch to the Mac’s mechanical keyboard, in 2021 I bought my first fountain pen in almost four decades. It did the trick.
(27) Mark Hallett, Hogarth (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), p. 244.
(28) In light of my initial dismissal of gendering Puckette’s style, Hogarth fascinatingly addressed The Analysis of Beauty — in an epoch that knew nothing but sexism — to ‘both Sexes’; Hallett 2000, p. 240.
(29) Pollock (1944), in Pepe Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 15.
(30) Early paintings from 1992 or thereabouts are wholly composed of curlicues. Notwithstanding the Hogarth parallels, I could not help linking them to the angelic curled hair in Rosso Fiorentino’s Dead Christ with Angels (c. 1526).
(31) See note 9.
(32) Famously, the cor anglais’s gossamer melodic line personifies the Swan, while divided strings and low percussion rolls evoke the dark underworld’s river.
(33) The notion of cross-hatching within the lines that is sometimes raised is mistaken.
(34) Parmigianino’s wood panel is actually convex – a token of the three-dimensionality inherent in curves. Puckette’s recent sculptures make this metamorphosis explicit.
(35) Henri Michaux is the modern odd-man-out. Puckette’s taste for Michaux probably stems from his mix of calligraphy, asemic writing, and Abstract Expressionism, not to mention Tachisme’s informality.
(36) An artist hard to pigeonhole but surely bridging the High Renaissance and Mannerism as well as anticipating the Baroque.
(37) A key history is Paolo D’Angelo, Sprezzatura. Concealing the Effort of Art from Aristotle to Duchamp (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
(38) John Shearman, Mannerism (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, and New York: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 17.
(39) Despite its civil engineering’s feat, a sharp contrast to the nearby Brooklyn Bridge’s gravity-defying, curving span.
(40) Puckette also showed me the brochure of a 2007 New York gallery exhibition (Peter Freeman Inc.) devoted to the nineteenth-century cliché verre. These glass and collodion-generated prints — with their ingenious mix of photography, negatives, transparency, opacity and drawing —suggest that Puckette may be on the brink of new creative horizons.
