One of the essays for the catalogue of the Donald Sultan exhibition currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art invokes Charles Baudelaire`s classic evaluation of Edouard Manet by calling Sultan a ”painter of modern life.”
What the phrase meant a century ago doubtless is clearer than its meaning today, as most things modern are said to have played themselves out. Still, modernity as a structure of belief never quite vanished. There always will be a conscious search for forms of expression that are ”new” yet related to the past; gifted young artists continue to pursue it even if everyone`s attention seems to be focused somewhere else.
Sultan, at 36, is one of those artists. A native of North Carolina, he speaks slowly, with a deliberation that proclaims how well he knows what he is about. Modernity is, for him, a living issue. And his allegiance to the continuum of modern painting shows the same sort of resolve as when (in 1975) he got a master`s degree from the Art Institute of Chicago and immediately set out to prove himself in New York.
Since then, his reputation has steadily ascended, though without the fanfare accorded some other painters of his generation. The present show is not, for example, a retrospective, as that Sultan has repeatedly declined.
”I think that people first need to see a body of work that is coherent,” he said, ”and I decided that the last five years of my paintings was a good block. A retrospective that includes earlier work will be that much more interesting about 10 years from now.”
But what about being a ”painter of modern life”? Is it a role Sultan takes on easily?
”The only way to plug into what I felt was the great continuum of painting was to use what was immediately at my disposal,” he said. ”There wasn`t any point in making paintings that were isolated; they had to reflect the kind of life I know and lead. So I altered common everyday occurrences, making them into something that has a confrontational attitude.
”I used to think of my still lifes as the fruit you would have in the morning while you were reading about a disaster in the newspaper. These things coexist. We have the information with us all the time, yet because it`s there I`m not sure we really pay that much attention to any of it. I decided to pay attention and see how everything related to the choices I made in my own life.”
Like many contemporary artists, Sultan works from photographs, some of which originate in the popular media. Yet such pictures have not been
”appropriated” only to be recast with a heavy dose of irony or critical comment.
”I felt that I didn`t need to comment on things that people could already see anyway,” he said. ”You open the newspaper and see a piece on a war zone next to a lingerie ad that is bigger. Now, it doesn`t take very much intelligence to see the irony in that. It`s already there, so I didn`t have any interest in pointing it out. I`m not trying to teach people anything. I`m trying to find pictures that have a compelling quality, that give the same feelings I have wanted from painting ever since I was a child.
”You know, you go to see great painting and it moves you in some way. Well, if you`re in your studio and can be moved in a way that has always mattered to you, it is important. This is competing with the past on the level of feeling, and I think that making paintings is hardly worthwhile any other way.”
Sultan admits that he is not sure how his paintings of fruit, flowers and the urban landscape tie together, for they are not in a style that comes with a readymade label. But, more important, they are in his own style. He believes that if an artist is honest with himself, a style will emerge to give appropriate form to ideas.
The modernity of Sultan`s style is attributable in part to his use of unusual materials, such as linoleum and tar. And about this, too, he has exercised a great deal of thought.
”At any given time, painters have worked with paint and substances that were interesting to them,” he said. ”You read of guys finding a new berry or gem that they could grind to give a perfect color. They always were finding such things. Well, at a certain point while I was working as a young painter, I would go into a paint store and it wasn`t that different from a hardware store because everything was made in a factory. So I thought, why should I limit myself to tubes of paint when I can have tubes of anything?
”Instead of building up thick surfaces, I could buy a material that already made the surface that way and I didn`t have to work twice as hard to get the same effect. I really thought of the tar only as paint . . . . I consciously decided: This is modern paint. I can use oils or I can use tar-whatever will come in a tube.
”I kept trying to eliminate things that I thought were unnecessary to make decisions about. I limited my palette. I limited the scale. I worked within the proscription of three-point perspective. Some of this emphasis on
`the basics` was due to the minimalist climate in which I grew up, but I also found that nothing else was needed. If I needed to do something else, then I would. But, so far, I haven`t needed anything more. Even my figures are always standardized silhouettes in postures that seem necessary to what they are doing.”
Sultan`s allegiance to representational images came from the belief that abstraction was, by itself, only forms and materials-and he never could feel that from that alone he would be able to see his own work improving. When he looked ahead 25 years,the work did not appear capable of holding interest.
”It was a conscious decision to say that it would be impossible, knowing what I know about paint, not to make a modern picture,” he said. ”So I felt that I might as well use all the subjects I could. I have done things that were very abstract and in the early, heady days even put a white tile down and called it `Polar Bear in a Snowstorm.` I never showed it but still felt that piece represented an essence of the change that had happened between my minimalist painting and putting imagery into it. If I say `It`s a polar bear in a snowstorm,` you`re going to say, `Who`s he kidding?` But, on the other hand, the idea of an image still has been transferred.
”When I did a painting called `Lines Down (November 11, 1985),` it was sort of like (Jackson) Pollock`s `Blue Poles,` a way of using imagery and having the chaos of the wires everywhere but also making it very abstract by limiting the palette. The idea was to come up with a picture that was both things, representational and abstract. That`s the interest of painting. There is no reason to stop on any of these things. We now know enough so that it is all possible to do.
”I started as a painter by subtracting and limiting; then, after a point, the work proceeded by addition. My fruit pictures could be flat. The flowers could be chaotic. Then the landscapes could have the air and atmosphere that came with deep space. I always felt the dichotomy between an iconographic image and depth. It was the same kind of thing as between gesture and abstraction.
”These are constant struggles that have gone on forever, and I think it`s great to have that dichotomy. I didn`t see why I should choose sides. The risk was that I would end up with a body of work in which everything was different, but I thought, well, what`s wrong with that? It is still the same style insofar as the style is the man. And so far, so good.”
”Donald Sultan,” organized by Chicago`s Museum of Contemporary Art, will continue through Nov. 8.
