Though regularly launched as a pupil of Mark Rothko and Clyfford Nonetheless, summary expressionist painter Lawrence Calcagno was his personal grasp. He was homosexual at a time when homosexuality was unlawful in the US, to not point out socially taboo. However he managed to attain profession success regardless of these prejudices, holding his first solo present in 1955 on the Martha Jackson Gallery. Jackson, a champion of avante-garde artwork, had famously proven works from Willem de Kooning’s Lady (1950–53) sequence earlier that yr. Calcagno’s present was equally a success, capturing the eye of Time Journal, which famous that the San Francisco native’s work had been “saturated with wealthy California earth tones and the shifting, fog-ridden horizons of the Pacific Coast.”
Calcagno’s profession blossomed from this primary exhibition: He would go on to carry a complete of 80 solo exhibits all through his profession, and was included in 9 Whitney Biennials (then, the Whitney Annual) in a two-decade span. But he went from blue-chip exhibitions and worldwide exhibits in Paris, London, Copenhagen, and Mexico Metropolis all the way down to considerably unknown standing within the years to comply with. The Whitney, for instance, owns 5 work and watercolors by Calcagno, however final confirmed them in 1970. Certainly, with out the efforts of critics and curators Lawrence Alloway and Gerald Nordland, Calcagno’s legacy as a visionary abstractionist is likely to be even additional misplaced to historical past.
Now’s the time to revisit the artist, who was grouped in with summary expressionism after which largely left off its ledgers, however who in actuality developed his personal community throughout an itinerant life. In 1955, Time quoted Calcagno on his European influences, or lack thereof: “With the demise of Matisse, the nice, nice custom of French portray is about labored out.” He added: “There are nonetheless main figures like Picasso and Braque, however they’re not coping with the speedy factor. The youthful painters are looking for a approach out. A few of them suppose we’ve acquired it.” What Calcagno and his contemporaries “acquired” was the abstraction of the day: painterly, expressive, and drawn from the unconscious.
Calcagno tailored what he discovered from his education on the California Faculty of Advantageous Arts in San Francisco into a private type by which bands of distilled daring coloration recalling horizons cohere into dynamic landscapes full of reductive brushwork, suggesting the breadth of nature as witnessed at completely different instances of day. Every canvas presents a robust sense of place and time: a picture of the ocean amid a storm, a battle between deep blue and black, as in “Pacifica II” (1971); a cross-section of earth, as within the unbroken pink and ochre expanses on the far edges of “Sapaque II” (1955), which coalesce right into a jumble of jagged, darkish strokes on the middle. The spirit of those works may need roots within the tutelage of Rothko and Nonetheless, however must also be learn within the context of his European contemporaries.
European masters like Braque and Picasso would possibly’ve not held a lot sway over Calcagno, however Europe known as due to its comparatively tolerant view on homosexuality within the Nineteen Fifties and ‘60s, whereby it was permitted so long as it was in non-public and out of view. There, he discovered his friends: On a go to to Paris, he met the painter Beauford Delaney, and the 2 would spend two years as a pair frequenting museums and cafes. This relationship introduced Calcagno in touch with writers James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, mates of Delaney who had come to the French capital to flee racism in the US and discover better freedom for themselves and their work.
Delaney and Calcagno specifically grew to share a detailed inventive bond, tied by their shared perception within the non secular nature of portray and abstraction, and remained shut after Calcagno returned to the US. The 2 exchanged a whole bunch of letters in Delaney’s later years. These correspondences had been susceptible and open, the prose verging on the non secular. In 1959, Delaney wrote: “Expensive Larry, your fantastic informative letter arrived at this time like a celestial sentinel. I had walked into Paris this morning… and right here was your letter… It nearly made me weak.”
Calcagno’s relationship with Delaney is however one of many many avenues to studying his physique of labor which have but to be absolutely traversed. “Portray was the one avenue via which I may discover psychical tolerance and be launched,” he as soon as wrote, as quoted in Marika Herskovic’s American Summary Expressionism of the Nineteen Fifties: An Illustrated Survey With Artists’ Statements, Artworks and Biographies. “My life has all the time been motivated not by mental or rational issues however extra by a subjective compulsion, by what I like.”