Who Was I?

Have you ever wondered who you might have been in previous lives? Many reincarnation enthusiasts believe that their progression through time is shot through with fame. Few like to imagine themselves as anonymous Medieval peasants, 19th century factory workers, or 20th century office drudges. The ego calls for glamor, excitement, power. J’etais Napoleon...

I occasionally tell students that their work reminds me of the drawings of a famous artist. Some accept the compliment. Some take offense. The latter group believe that everything they produce comes from a spring of creativity to which they have exclusive rights, that they have no predecessors or close relatives in the art world. I, on the other hand, look for kinship. Making art is a lonely exercise. I like to daydream that I’ve got a few friends who have traveled similar roads.

I sometimes look for artists whose work I could have drawn or painted. I imagine that I might have been one of them. I usually discover, however, that my favorites died after I was born. The chained sequences of our lives remain unlinked. In more pessimistic moods, I suspect that in a former life I sat at a Parisian bistro with another painter, an anonymous Jacques or Jean, but not with anyone whose work I now admire. Jean and I would have stared down at our cups of absinthe, bemoaned injustices perpetuated by dealers and critics, while secretly despising each other’s work. Quelle domage.

I’ve recently discovered a group of French artists who were active after WWII. The Tachists worked more intuitively, spontaneously than the rationalist, reductionist painters preceding them. They wanted to find out where the paint would take them instead of chaining themselves to a programmatic methodology.

Tachisme has often been described as the European response to the American Abstract Expressionists, but the movement arose independently. I find their work more palatable than Pollock’s and De Kooning’s. The Tachists still believed in composition, while the American painters often let their paintings drift until they became collections of inarticulate wriggles.

Oil painting by De Kooning

Serges Poliakoff and Andre Lanskoy seem the most attractive out of the Tachisme group. They both died, inconveniently for me, a decade or so after my birth. I was neither of them. C’est triste.

Oil painting by Serge Poliakoff

Oil painting by Andre Lanskoy