Howard Kanovitz essays about the artist

The Impulse to Autobiography in the work of Howard Kanovitz
by Michael Florescu

A century ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that the art of fiction would be superseded eventually by the practice of autobiography "if only," he cautioned, "if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly." If only a man knew how to choose -the phrase dives off the page with almost fatalistic desperation. If only a man knew... The implication is that even though a man struggle with uncertainty and doubt, search tirelessly within himself for a firm handhold, and persist in evaluating his efforts, constant attention must be paid if he is to separate successfully the authentic from the fraudulent, the committed from the objective, the pure and simple from the merely simplistic. That has always been the challenge of autobiography. Yet despite the difficulty, it is no wonder that in these dangerous days, when experiences are validated statistically rather than for the intensity of their meaning for the individual, the painter, along with the writer and the more popular interpretive artists, feels an urgent need for self-exposure, to offer up the net sum of his memories and projections -rather than be judged for his ingenuity and skill in performing with light and space, the formal exercises of illusionism. Of course a tendency toward the autobiographical in American art is by no means new, but in the late 'seventies what had formerly been a tendency achieved the scale of a movement.

Icarus

In part reacting against the doctrinalre compartmentalism of the 'fifties and 'sixties, artists from allover the United States have been "doing their own thing," that is, employing the materia prima of their own day-to-day lives to express their responses to the world at large. In considering this impulse in

the work of Howard Kanovitz, where it is manifested in a quite special way, it will be helpful to follow it back to its immediate origins in the first post-War generation of American Originals, the Abstract Expressionists, each one of whom was seeking, in the words of the late Harold Rosenberg, "a unique idiom in which to unveil a being underlying consciousness." Along into the mid-'fifties, Kanovitz's response to the exigent mysteries of personal identity, "a being underlying consciousness," was couched in the still dominant Abstract Expressionist mode. But then, quite abruptly Kanovitz under- went a traumatic experience: The death of his father brought him face to face with the irreducible fact of corporeality. Over-night, Kanovitz discovered that his accustomed professional practice of spontaneous self-examination was yielding up a new, and for him original element. This new element was figuration. His first truly significant work, the one in which the figures can be seen emerging from the medium of the paint itself is "Four A.M. Eastern Standard Time."

New Yorkers II

The significance of this work can, however, scarcely be perceived in isolation; it will be necessary to consider it as the first in a sequence of four works which span the years 1955 through 1979. Before he produced the second in this extraordinarily revealing sequence, Kanovitz waited ten years, and then in 1966 he painted what was to be a seminal work in the Photo-Realist canon, "New Yorkers 2;" "Icarus," the most complex of the four was done in 1975; and then, to represent the consummation of this quite individual mode of inquiry, the large pastel "The End of All That." Lest that appear a wholly arbitrary selection, let me explain, at the outset, that I expect an examination of those four examples to reveal, stage by stage, the evolution of Kanovitz's attitudes to autobiography, and of the means by which he has made contact with "a being underlying consciousness."