Ed Adler's Wilde Ride
 |
From Paris to New York, Ed Adler garners the kind of admiration and connections that fine artists envy. And like Oscar Wilde, the subject of his most recent paintings, Adler's life story reveals that he pours as much of his energy into his life as he does into his art. |
Adler recently started working on a series of paintings that combine one of his favorite subjects – images of the Wild West – with a new passion: Oscar Wilde and his journey across America in 1882. Blending pop and fauvist colors, pulp fiction imagery, and a bold sense of composition, Adler's paintings are highly coveted. To see more of Adler's work, go to edadler.com or call 212-619-2480. Ed Adler Events |
|
Events |
|
 |
Pop Mythologies to Plato's Cave, (Which May or May Not Contain a Chicken), An Odyssey In Art: Ed Adler New Works |
 |
Wilde, Horses and Cowboys: Ed Adler Exhibit |
 |
On the Trail of Oscar Wilde In Denver and Paris |
 |
Beyond Words: The Art of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation |
 |
|
Chris Loffelmacher: Your art uses antique and ancient themes and symbols, but its relevancy to our times is unmistakable. And many of your paintings seem to be a frozen moment of an epic story. What ideas, values or intentions compel your artwork?
Ed Adler: The key word here is "compel." The compulsion to fill any blank space with imagery is the oldest I can remember. All my notebooks from grade school to college were filled with sketches of no relevancy whatever to the course, and even my textbooks had the blank borders around the text illustrated with funny faces, fighter planes – I grew up during the war – and elaborate doodles of whatever was passing through my consciousness at the moment. And whatever compelled the artwork then is what compels it now: the moment, maybe. But, if it's more complicated, I don't think I want to know.
About the symbols, ancient, antique, contemporary, it's all part of that non-discursive language that is in fact describing the epic story you detected. And "Intention" by the way, is an excellent term for the elucidation of artwork. So often the artist's intention is perceived as something else by the viewer. Part of the mystery of art–and an important part, too. It gives the painting alternative lives.
CL: There is something so modern about your depictions of the Old West that it makes us feel that this West still exists – or makes us wish that it did. For you, is the "Wild West” a state of being or state of mind?
EA: Let me tell you how the pop cowboy series began. Reflecting back on the art that excited me as a red-blooded American kid, it was the cowboy images on the pulp western magazines, on sale at newsstands for 10 cents, with pulpy cheap paper inside, but great covers in brilliant color of rugged cowboys in red shirts and white ten gallon hats with guns blazing, horses rearing up and a bosomy maiden in distress being swept away in rescue from the villains. On really sexy issues there might even be a bit of her bare knee exposed.
When I began the cowboy paintings in 1999, there were few old pulp western magazines to be found, the cheap paper had disintegrated, but some books at the New York Public Library taught me the style and aesthetic, and I did 45 paintings for a New York University show, along with 25 more based on Bubblegum War Cards.
In the course of painting the cowboy series, I immersed myself in the lore of the Wild West. Lots of John Wayne movies and Zane Grey Books – I learned he was a New Yorker, which was comforting – and by the way, sales went remarkably well considering it was in ultra urban Greenwich Village Manhattan. Meanwhile, I bought cowboy boots and loved 'em, now have eight pair, mostly from my friend Tony Benattar of the great Liberty Boot Company. And own a couple of cowboy hats that I enjoy wearing but can't figure out what to do with them in a restaurant. Wearing a cowboy hat while eating in New York just doesn't work.
Now, as for the paintings, the action is found in extensive research in old western history books with etchings, in movies, and videos, and finalized in the studio using an assortment of old cap pistols and a couple of .22 rifles and an original 1940s Red Ryder BB Gun that a friend got me for my fiftieth birthday. So I guess the West in my work exists pretty much in my mind. But then again, it's that essence and the spirit that does seem to come through, somehow.
CL: Oscar Wilde wrote humorously and sympathetically of his journey through Denver and Leadville, and of the people he met. It's really no surprise how easily he's slipped into the imagery of your cowboy paintings – but what is it about Oscar that makes him a great pairing with this imagery – his status as a social outlaw, his love of miners and working class men, his larger than life personality?
EA: I see Oscar as the quintessential "City Slicker,” the perfect "Dude,” who, while visiting the Wild West, finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is a passenger in the stagecoach when it is attacked by a gang of bandits; he steps out of a bar and into an ambush. He is out for a stroll in town and happens upon a confrontation between a whip yielding Mexican and a gun toting cowpoke. Could there be any better audience for these histrionic scenarios than Oscar?
And we know that he is a large fellow, and powerful in this prime year of 1882, so we don't worry about him in this violent milieu. We in fact can share with him the thrills that he must be enjoying in these somewhat Spaghetti Western inspired fragments. It may be imaginary, it may be a century late, but it is certainly well intended as an extension of Oscar's Western adventure.
CL: When I first discovered the writing of Oscar Wilde for myself, I became a little obsessive. And I must admit that I enjoy reading and learning about his life as much or more than reading his plays, poems or stories. Oscar is the story. In his words, "I put my talent into my art and my genius into my life.” Has Oscar gotten under your skin, too?
EA: Oscar and I go way back. I spend a lot of time in Paris and discovered years ago that Oscar's old hotel room, the last he stayed in, was still available. And it became my home-away-from-home, this wonderfully restored, richly colored in burgundy's and vermilions, and furnished with the original, now antique, chairs, table and bed. And the hotel, it's name has changed since Oscar's days, it's now simply called "L'Hotel,” is small and unostentatious, on a narrow left bank street, Rue des Beaux Arts, right next to the big Paris art school, l'Ecole des Beaux Arts. Staying there always added an extra dimension to my second city. Yes, New York is first.
And I can't tell you how many times I have used his quote about using one's talent for one's art and one's genius for one's life. I thought about it every morning waking up in that red room and I've incorporated it into my end-of-semester farewell address to my students for many years.
I've been reading the Richard Ellmann book on Oscar, which is remarkable for its detail. It has the day-by-day itinerary of his American tour, receipts for items he purchased while at Oxford, and some fine photos of himself, family and friends. The book his son Vivyan Holland wrote has less information but great illustrations. And there's another book out now by his grandson. You are right about Oscar's life being competitive with his work. He clearly lived up to that credo of his.
CL: Ed, as an expert on Jack Kerouac, his writing and his art, I'm wondering how you see the interesting connection between Oscar's journey across America some seventy years prior to the day when Jacky Kerouac first stuck out his thumb to go on the road. Oscar's journey was certainly more artificial (a lecture tour meant to promote Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Patience), but I wonder if they saw things in a similar way.
EA: If we think in terms of Jack Kerouac traveling with Neal Cassady and Oscar with his manager and valet, the two trips couldn't be more different. There are few real-life or fictional characters that can compete with Neal for charisma, charm, and daring. He was the original "Wild and Crazy Guy.” Fast cars, fast women, hard drinking, excess in all things. Jack becomes the conservative member of the duo.
Oscar's manager, from what I understand, was focused and fully occupied with finances and accommodations. His valet's concerns were over the then rampant racism in America. And Oscar viewed Americans as a breed apart from their British forbears: badly dressed, badly mannered and seriously in need of aestheticization.
Jack saw Americans as his proud fellow countrymen, fine patriots, and the best of the fellaheen in all their glory. He dug the regional differences in scenery and personality. Yes, both Jack and Oscar did their On the Road piece, but the stories were generations and continents apart.
CL: And were they both looking for the same thing?
EA: I do believe they were both in search of the essence of America and the American way of life. Oscar, however, was saddled with the practical concerns of being on a highly organized lecture tour, speaking almost nightly to audiences that expected to be entertained, amused, and educated. His trip would compare well with a musician or stand-up comic tour.
Jack was more the observer, always writing, often silent, listening, riding in the car or bus, always someone else doing the driving. Jack filled his notebooks with phenomenologically detailed descriptions of everything he saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and how he felt about it.
In both cases their life was their art and America was their canvas.
CL: Fifty years ago, Kerouac began paving the way for artists today to think and respond differently to their contemporary world. Oscar's journey before that may have helped Kerouac to start out on the road. Kinda nice to think of it as the eternal road, isn't it? Each artist or writer or anyone who holds a mirror up to the people and let's them take a good, hard look – adds a paving stone or two into that road.
EA: Maybe it was Oscar's pre-prison lifestyle as an aesthetist, so filled with wit, so flamboyant, so histrionic that was a step in overwhelming the dusty, overbearing Victorian moralization of society. Oscar, like Jack, was indeed part of a subtle movement that did not recognize itself as such. Would James MacNeil Whistler, Jimmy to Oscar, or Andre Gide, who said, "I lean with fearful attraction at the depths of each creature's possibilities, and weep for all that lies atrophied under the heavy lid of custom and morality," consider themselves part of an anti-Victorian mores movement? And to this day, many poets, writers and artists generally associated with the Beat Generation, deny any connection with it.
I think in Jack's case, he was never out to change the world, or even change anyone else's way of writing. He sought the spontaneity he first perceived in a long letter written by Neal Cassady and in pursuit of it evolved a style of spontaneous prose that became his own voice in a direct line from his soul. His stories thus told, were so natural, so relatable, his readers felt he was either inspiring their life or describing it.
And this ongoing, eternal road, paved by Jack 50 years ago and by Oscar 50 years before that, and by all of those in the persuasion of the arts through the centuries, well, those paving stones should be yellow brick.
CL: Cowboys and pinup girls, Greek and Roman mythology, American history, pop art traditions – all these subjects have been turned into iconic images in your art. Any idea about what will spring out of your palette next?
EA: Actually, I might know. There is always a pivotal event, painting, sometimes a statement that veers me off course into unknown territory.
I've been thinking lately about a quote I came across by the art critic Karl Shapiro, "What will our children's children think about the art monsters of today, when in future years the nations of the world are at peace, and as in the golden days of the renaissance, art will again become gorgeous, and perhaps, holy."
My Ph.D. thesis dealt with the effects of intra-psychic and environmental stress on the genesis of artistic creativity. I, along with a lot of other people, was making art that was anti-establishment, anti-war, angry social commentary. If you want to think of them as hanging in your home, yes, they were those art "monsters" Shapiro talks about. Today, with the socio-political slogan of "change” in the air, and maybe some new types of Americans running the show, we'll get that yellow brick road to Oz, and maybe, just maybe, the art will become gorgeous, and perhaps holy.
| View the complete Wild Wilde West schedule (PDF). | |
|
|
A sign language interpreter will be provided upon request with five business days notice. Call 720-913-8484 TTY or contact Lorrie.Kosinski@ci.denver.co.us.
|
|
Denver Public Library Online ©
Updated: May 14, 2008
