One night we had a
tennis pro friend over from Provincetown
B.H
Friedman
In 1943, artists Ben Shahn and Francis Brennan (former art
editor for Fortune magazine) subsituted cola bottles for bayonets and
encaptioned their poster depicting soldiers marching with, “The war that
refreshes”–adding, “Try all 4 Delicious Freedoms.”
To elaborate on Daniel Belgrad's example above, the author of The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America reports, “Ad techniques have done more toward dimming perception,
suspending critical values and spreading the sticky syrup of complacency over
people than any other factor.”
When I brought this example up to Ed Meneeley in 2011, he said, "That was when we began losing our humanity, when the magic of art became co-opted by the establishment to manipulate people. I've worked against my whole life. It's what abstract-expressionism is all about, breaking through the plasticity. After the annulment, it's what I dedicated my life to."
By the late 1950s / early 1960s, Manhattan hosted a community of creative intellectuals. Some evenings, after closing the Five Spot or the Cedar Tavern, Meneeley would invite elements of the scene back to his studio, folks like Fritz Bultman, Helen Frankenthaler and Bob & Abby Friedman.
Known on the byline of his many books, including Jackson Pollock’s first biography Energy Made Visible, as B.H. Friedman, Ed claims Bob once mistook one of Meneeley’s balsa wood sculptures for a chair, crushing it when he sat down. During my hour together with him in his Upper East Side Apartment overlooking the gigantic Pepsi sign across theEast
River , Friedman spoke fondly of Ed, emphasizing Meneeley’s place
in history as the major archival photographer of his day.
By the late 1950s / early 1960s, Manhattan hosted a community of creative intellectuals. Some evenings, after closing the Five Spot or the Cedar Tavern, Meneeley would invite elements of the scene back to his studio, folks like Fritz Bultman, Helen Frankenthaler and Bob & Abby Friedman.
Known on the byline of his many books, including Jackson Pollock’s first biography Energy Made Visible, as B.H. Friedman, Ed claims Bob once mistook one of Meneeley’s balsa wood sculptures for a chair, crushing it when he sat down. During my hour together with him in his Upper East Side Apartment overlooking the gigantic Pepsi sign across the
“Every artist was grateful for Portable Gallery," B.H. Friedman said, "It was a wonderful service and a great record of our time. It was the only thing quite like it. Very important. As an artist in his own right, Ed was a serious contributor, particularly his IBM Drawings, important to the extent that the movement was important in itself. I think history will place the two of us both in the heart of the periphery.”
I couldn’t help but prod about Friedman’s close friend, Pollock.
“
Was he the same man in private as he was in public?
“He did some things there was no excuse for, like slugging a Preppie at a jazz club who was just standing around the bandstand. But sometimes he was really nice and capable of tender paintings like Lavender Mist."
 |
 |
Friedman continued, “The night Jackson died was my 30th birthday party.
Abby had the sense to say we were getting out of the car and would get
another lift because Pollock was drunk.
We were some of the only ones who stopped in to see Ruth Kligman in the
hospital because Lee and her friends despised her. After Pollock, Ruth went on
to De Kooning and later Kline, knocking them off one by one.”
Meneeley was still new to the scene at the time of Pollock’s fatal car crash, and the two men never met beyond a passing nod at the Cedar Tavern whenJackson Museum
of Modern Art
Meneeley was still new to the scene at the time of Pollock’s fatal car crash, and the two men never met beyond a passing nod at the Cedar Tavern when
Another painful memory Meneeley often calls to mind was the experience of photographing an Arshile Gorky painting in Sidney Janis’s personal collection.
“Janis’s wife let me in to their apartment,” Meneeley recalls. “There I was, working with an 8x10, with a black cloth over my head in order to position the painting on the glass when my host began chatting about how they acquired it.
"She then added that the price was exactly 2 months rent, about $120. I know the reason I am photographing it is because it is worth at least $10,000, and she’s lucky she couldn’t see my face under the cloth because I came very near to throwing a fit.”
Meneeley understood the pain
Such were
the legends told in studios and bars already spun as Meneeley started his
career in 1955, attempting to enter the New York
In the seven years since
Inspired by Monet’s late lily ponds, Meneeley began dripping color on linen canvases using a machine that produced soft-edged, vertical, ribbon-like dissections of multiple hues. Cavaliere writes, “Although they appear hand-made and improvisational, [they] are, in fact, mechanically produced and controlled. Paintings of this period point emphatically toward future directions; their emphasis on vertical spatial motion and contrasting color relationships, and their dialectic on machine manufactures/hand-made processes, rational/irrational structuring exemplify Meneeley decisive concerns for coming years.”
In this way, Meneeley was ahead of his time. He had found a process wholly his own and could finally step out of the shadow of his predecessors, though for a member of the second generation, comparisons would inevitably remain, most commonly with Barnett Newman.
Cavaliere explains, “What Meneeley actively sought from Newman was a jumping off place, a visual simplicity he could turn into something else, something more in tune with his perceptual and irrational personality. Unlike Newman, Meneeley uses his verticals to build color associations which affect spatial orientation; his placements are always off-center even as his colors are in-between. He is more closely related to Stamos, with whom he shares a delight in intuitive spatial ordering and an affinity with the sensuous colors in nature.”
Theodoros Stamos would later become a great friend of Meneeley’s, and the two men would often spend their summers on the Greek isle of Lefkada where they fostered a productive dialogue over many years resulting in a shoe-box full of letters, mostly from Stamos now faded and undecipherable, which Meneeley bestowed upon me after I accepted his invitation to write this book. Choosing a random sample, I've scanned and posted it below.
2
Early in 1962 Meneeley was awarded
his first solo exhibition in New York City 1111 Lexington Avenue 72nd Street
 |
| Parma Gallery Poster |
Around the same time, Franz Kline suffered a heart attack and was admitted to St. Clare's Hospital. Released a few weeks later, Kline remained unable to paint.
“One of my last memories of Franz,” Meneeley recalls, “Has him sitting at the edge of a bar, his worn tweed jacket, without elbow patches (but probably could have used them), worn with great dignity and class, still haunts me half a century later. Today I live just blocks away from his teenage home.”
Meneeley’s Parma Gallery opening reception came the night after Kline’s funeral. Ed remembers the day sadly, “I had this idea that I wanted Franz to wait to see the work at the show, so early on I discouraged him from visiting my studio. Then he took ill and would never get to see the work. It was one of the worst mistakes in my life.”
By all accounts, the Parma Gallery show was a hit, solidifying Meneeley’s place among the scene. Yet the long shadow of his friend’s funeral absorbed most Ed’s energy and attention, as well as most columns of art-related newsprint. Nonetheless, a week later Stuart Preston, writing in the Times on May 19, 1962 described Meneeley’s work at Parma as “more or less of the de Kooning persuasion” done by a man with “admirable deftness and cunning of touch that make each separate brush-gesture a pleasure to look at.”
3
Later the
same year, 1962, Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s
Soup Cans, appeared on the scene,
satirizing America
Ed claims he met Andy when Warhol was designing window displays on Madison Avenue. He remembers one of Andy’s earliest Campbell Soup Cans, with its label weathered as though it had been tossed in the trash. To Ed, there was no cynicism in this piece. It was too sentimental. Only when they become a series did they make a mockery of other movements.
Warhol’s rise to prominence, according to Meneeley, is partly due to the interest of art historian Henry Geldzahler, the man who “changed everything” when he became Curator for American Art and later the first Curator for 20th Century Art at the Met.
Best known later for his landmark 1969 exhibition,
Both openly gay, Geldzahler and Warhol become good friends, and Andy would later produce a 90-minute film consisting of nothing more than Geldzahler becoming increasingly agitated, smoking a cigar.
“Now try to imagine this was taking place in your mind before you had been bombarded by millions of television commercials. Think about the effect awakening to the powerful lure branding and marketing were having on our brains must have been like. That was the real power behind Warhol’s work!”
 |
| Warhol at the Stable Gallery 1964 |
4
Before long, Pop punched the art world square in the face, creating tremendous upheaval.
Trying to understand this claim, Meneeley asked me to imagine I was a professional athlete who, all of a sudden, was forced to learn to play the game with a different set of rules. “It shook everybody up,” he insisted. “As interest switched from Abstract Expressionism and Pop gained more ground, I began to worry if the intellectual value of art was at risk.”
Admittedly, Meneeley recognized much of the establishment was never keen on abstract art. Many collectors, he claims, preferred recognizable imagery in paintings, like in the works of Andrew Wyeth. But Ed laments those who judge without understanding the roots of Abstract Expressionism, some of whom derided the movement as though someone was playing a long elaborate joke on them, as in: That mess looks like something my three-year-old could scribble.
When I asked him to be more specific, his answer caught me off guard.
“Art has an effect like taking an aspirin or having a drink,” Ed said, continuing, “Color, luminosity, luster—subtleties meant to have an emotional affect on your audience, but done in a way so they, the audience, don’t realize they are being seduced. Pop Art didn’t allow for this magic. It was much too rational.”
Nevertheless, very few abstract painters saw decent wages in their lifetimes. And all of a sudden, Pop was making money. Never known to constrict himself to any single style, Meneeley embraced Pop, led by his fellow Pennsylvanian Andrew Warhola.
One of Ed's first acts was to issue The World’s First Pop Art Newspaper with his Portable Gallery Press, a glorified slide catalogue featuring the works of George Deem, Jim Dine, Roselyn Drexler, Stephen Durkee, Dorothy Grebenak, Philip Hefferton, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns (labeled a distinguished forerunner), Yoyoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Robert Moskowitz, Claes Oldenburg, Mel Ramos, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Wayne Thiebaud, Albert Vanderburg, Tom Wesselman, Ann Wilson, and Andy Warhol.
According to Meneeley’s last remaining copy, tattered and yellowed with age, “Best Sellers” up to this time, 1 / 1 / 1963, included The Evolution of the Buddha Image, along with Kline, de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Motherwell, Frankenthaler and Barnett Newman.
Free with every order comes a free color slide of the Beatles! Limited Times Only! Order Now!
On the back page, among the lists of artists and works available, a listing for the complete library of 345 color slides of Contemporary Painting, including the works of 95 artists, could be purchased for $250.
Contemporary Sculpture, featuring 28 artists and 114 slides, $100.
Here are the included listings Jasper Johns and Marisol, photography by Ed Meneeley:
5
There were no mistaking the tremors of Pop Art among gallery gossip while Ed shot works for his day job. And, in the evenings,
he continued taking risks with his own aesthetic, and eventually fathered an
entirely new medium, the Electro-Static Print.
“A friend,
Wayne Adams, worked with IBM,” Meneeley recalls, “And he knew I was fascinated
with the technology. While working one
weekend, Adams invited me in to see some of the
equipment, one of which was a large 914 printer with a flat glass bed to put
materials on.”
He continued:
I later found out that Xerox owned
the patent on electrostatic printing, and I realized that anything that could
bend around the surface of the cylinder was printable. As I saw the camera lens
pass before my eyes, I realized what this was all about. We were dealing with light. We were dealing with shadows. There was more to this than just copying
these written sheets.
I saw this as a step forward. One could feed any type of object to the
machine. The outside—an echo of reality,
more haunting, more aesthetic than the copy of the object itself—crossed my
mind as an advance in lithography and could advance fine art making in a new
direction and potential.
The only question left was: what
are we going to do with it?
I called Wayne Adams, and he agreed
to let me into the building and we began boot-legging prints. The first was inspired by Gertrude Stein’s
poem, Tender Buttons. As I progressed I added pins and needles and
everything that had some connection with buttons. I pulled excerpts from the poem and sometimes
they would determine the print. Having
the glass plate, everything was created right then and there. There was no way the arrangement would be
reproduced. Authenticity of the edition
could then be justified.
 |
| Tender Buttons Elcetro-Static Print IV Ed Meneeley |
In a few weekends we had 50 copies of the first edition. On subsequent additions, before this was
made public, I was observing other qualities—floor debris, a punch card machine, typewriter
ribbons, the ball of a typewriter—anything I could get my hands on without interrupting the
corporation’s activities.
 |
| Tender Buttons
Electro-Static Print I by Ed Meneeley |
I wanted to do color. I ran an edition of 10. There was a second edition of prints, IBM
drawings, created with excerpts from a corporate training booklet. The man who created the booklet realized
later his manual had been used for its illustrations. Thankfully he took the joke and was
appreciative. He’s mathematical, and the
joke was extremely subtle.
There is a lot more
sensuality/sexuality in the second set, IBM
Drawings, than in Tender Buttons. While the juices were flowing, I gathered
enough objects of different texture to do Portraits,
People and Objects. It was an
edition of 10 and had no text. I
utilized photographic materials collected and produced personally. Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, the James
Waring Dance Company – a portrait of the artists as people see them, a
self-portrait, a face and other objects, two body parts. I had Wayne Adams sit on the machine. The Japanese loved it. I then did a penis
part with band-aides serving as compositional barriers, hit the button…it
finished the edition.
Yes, it’s true, the first person to photocopy a pair of naked, hairy buttocks—now the stuff of giddy interns and office pranksters—had invented a new artistic medium recognized by many prestigious collections that acquired copies, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Stats for the three ground-breaking folios:
1965 Illustrations for Tender Buttons, a folio of ten black-and-white electrostatic prints in illustration of accompanying text excerpted from Gertrude Stein published in a limited signed edition of fifty by Teuscher Editions, New York City
1966 IBM
Drawings, a folio of ten black-on-color electrostatic
prints with accompanying text excerpted from selected writings of computer
scientists published in a limited signed edition of fifteen by Teuscher Editions,
New York City
1968 Portraits:
People and Objects, a folio of fifteen black-and-white and black-on-color
electrostatic prints published in a limited signed edition of fifteen by
Teuscher Editions, New York City
6
Curator Daniel Robbins was a champion of Color Field painters. After a Fulbright scholarship in
“As we arrived to attend the lecture, the guards told us the museum was closing down,” Meneeley recalls. Minutes prior, John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
As the world mourned the death of JFK, Robbin’s lecture series, which Meneeley was counting on to help him through a rough patch, was closed down and forgotten. In order to get a better handle on his life, Ed retreated to his summer studio in
 |
| Untitled oil on canvas Ed Meneeley, circa 1963 |
During this time Meneeley’s paintings became drips, skittering down. For the most part he avoided the derelict town. Of all intents and purposes, he was living in a barn. The family who owned the property and lived in the house nearby were trustees of the
When the summer heat subsided, Meneeley and Vanderburg moved into a new 3-room apartment on the
Meneeley continued hanging out in galleries, camera always at the ready, keeping his ear to the ground as to what was going on. “You hear phone conversations,” he recalled, “people arguing while setting up equipment; those moments exposed quite a lot of chatter. Because I was all over the place and had the background to link it all up as to what’s going on, I could stay ahead of the game.”
At night, in his studio, he confronted the blank surface, getting high off the smell of paint, listening to jazz. “It was better than sex,” he would later claim.
Most canvases were finished in a single session. “Sometimes I’d see the sunrise," he said, "Hours and hours and hours went by, but I felt, I understood, and realized they all had to be done at one time, I couldn’t stop and start or there would be something missing.”
Finished, he’d let it dry and go off to wash his brushes before crashing. Upon waking up, a whole new life breathed on the canvas before him, energized and still.
 |
| Death of the 20th Century Ed Meneeley |
7
Jean and Fritz Bultman became two
of Meneeley’s most appreciated frinds.
One of Ed’s favorite stories to tell centers on the silver painted ceiling
of Fritz Bultman’s studio in Provincetown in which Fritz claimed was the best way to balance out the light. Upon recognizing the
usefulness of the set-up, Ed covered the entire interior of his Cooper
Square
Meneeley claims Billy Linich, a
permanent fixture at Andy Warhol’s studio at 231 East 47th Street, would be the
third in line by the time he “silverized” the interior of The Factory in early 1964,
though he would become the one famous for it.
Along with Gertrude Stein, another
of Meneeley’s biggest influences was Marcel Duchamp. “The man married Matisse’s widow,” Meneeley
joked, “so he never needed to buy the famous painting of her because he had the
real thing."
Ed spent an afternoon with
Duchamp, documenting his work during a single session at French & Company
on Madison Avenue, among which would result in one of his most licensed
photographs taken of the famous readymade titled Fountain, an upside-down urinal signed R. Mutt.
 |
| Fountain, Marcel Dechamp |
“Marcel was a total intellectual,” Meneeley claims. “He was not about color. His work was analytical. After he died, there was a rush of cheap interpretations of conceptual art that never would have happened when he was alive because he was so smart he would have shut them down.”
By the time of Duchamp’s death in 1968, the art world had changed. What had begun as a tight-knit community held together by mutual poverty was becoming about status.
“Art had become a commodity,” Meneeley claimed, “With the Depression giving way to a complacent standard of living. Certain dealers consolidated their power and began to assert more control in an artist’s work, focusing on what was most likely to sell. In this way, some were held back because they were frightened for their own livelihoods.”
As for Ed, he had the great luxury to change and grow, not grinding out the same old song, his ability to navigate, he claims, "upset a lot of people."
8
Virgil Thompson, another of Meneeley’s most admired friends, was “a class act in terms of social structure, out of the
 |
| Alice B. Toklas & Gertrude Stein at home in 1923 |
Throughout our interviews, Meneeley would often speak of the expatriate leader hiring a cab with her lover, Alice B. Toklas, to rescue soldiers from front lines of WWII. Ed reports:
She was her own force who made
things happen. She was that smart, and understood
without becoming befuddled by other intellectuals. She had her own money, and never hid that she
was a lesbian; a real core crackerjack, witty, entertaining, charming. When
looking at paintings, she wouldn’t let you think of them as paintings; rather,
they were a particular piece of phenomena of this particular time in culture,
and you just happened to have a hold of it.
It was never painting with
Gertrude, it was culture. That’s what’s
missing from today’s academic art school environment. They’ve taken the culture
out of the art curriculum and turned it into something you read about in a book
and then leave behind.
When Abstract Expressionists got Pop!, punched right in the face, we didn’t
have the intellect to fight it. If we
had better access to Gertrude’s insights, we would have realized we didn’t have
to fight it. We all could have survived beautifully.
Everything became merchandise and moved
away from that terribly spooky thing called culture.
People wanted to invest in a commodity, and
Leo Castelli encouraged it all because he was selling it all.
When I asked Ed why he didn’t just have Castelli represent him, he near took me out with his fist. “Now say that about some baseball player,” he rebuked.
Oh, I thought, because you are the competition. He’s already invested in others.
“Castelli hated my guts. He was scared to death of me. When he saw Tender Buttons he nearly shit a brick because Andy Warhol hadn’t done it! He’s not going to celebrate me because our situation is producing even more riches. This is where they all became narrow-minded and pig-skinned. I was out photographing it not with that spirit in mind!”
I thought about it for a second. “Seems like they had already sealed off their hatches…already set up and defined the movement for their own personal benefit.”
Meneeley laughed, “Until the minimalists came!”
9
Influential art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl was born in 1942 inNorth Dakota Minnesota ,
he studied first at Carleton College
and later at the New School Paris for a year before settling in New
York
At some point in the early 60s, Meneeley can’t remember when, Schjeldahl curated a minimalist group show in a space recently vacated by the Kootz Gallery before the close of its lease.
According to Meneeley, Peter worked at the Green Gallery, and the two men met as Ed photographed a recent show there. During the usual chatting that went along with shooting an entire show, Peter learned Ed was also an artist, and became sufficiently enticed to view Meneeley’s work in his studio. There were a few minimalist pieces, circles and Russian Supremacist trigonometry. To Ed’s delight, Schjeldahl selected a series of a dozen glossy red color fields painted over with bands of color called Caboose to hang on their own in the backroom of the gallery.
Influential art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl was born in 1942 in
At some point in the early 60s, Meneeley can’t remember when, Schjeldahl curated a minimalist group show in a space recently vacated by the Kootz Gallery before the close of its lease.
According to Meneeley, Peter worked at the Green Gallery, and the two men met as Ed photographed a recent show there. During the usual chatting that went along with shooting an entire show, Peter learned Ed was also an artist, and became sufficiently enticed to view Meneeley’s work in his studio. There were a few minimalist pieces, circles and Russian Supremacist trigonometry. To Ed’s delight, Schjeldahl selected a series of a dozen glossy red color fields painted over with bands of color called Caboose to hang on their own in the backroom of the gallery.
Before leaving, over his shoulder, Peter spied Yellow Sponge Fever, a painting Meneeley originally meant as a joke. He had squished sponges in yellow paint and allowed them to weld together as they dried in a field of color. Then, with an electric knife, he cut strips of other sponges and allowed them to absorb pinks and blues. From those he created lines of color above the yellow.
 |
| untitled Sponge Painting by Ed Meneeley |
Meneeley arrived at the opening in a big Cadillac with a small group of friends only to find that someone had taken down Yellow Sponge Fever. Peter explained the mutiny and reassured him of the place of Caboose, but Ed objected, “If you won’t have Yellow Sponge Fever, you can’t have Caboose!”
Slowly, audibly, in front of all to see Ed dismantled the back room and put it in the trunk of the car. “I’ll be back for Yellow Sponge Fever tomorrow,” he remembers saying as he drove away.
Schjeldahl did not respond to my request for comment. Perhaps if Ed would have realized Peter would go on to become critic for the New York Times and later New Yorker magazine, he would have behaved himself. Nevertheless, others were impressed.
Once Walter Chrysler, at the time building a collection for the Chrysler Museum, got wind of the story, he immediately bought a pair of Meneeleys—a television set converted into sculpture and a second piece made from a large camera in a box, striped with color, which once you pressed a button light burst so bright it blinded one for a few moments after it flashed.
“I’m interested in any artist the other artists don’t like,” Meneeley recalls Chrysler declaring after handing him a sizeable check.
10
 |
| Meneeley with Tibor De Nagy |
Writing for
Arts magazine in December 1980,
Barbara Cavaliere traces Meneeley’s career paying special attention to the role
historical precedent plays in the formation of an artist. She writes, “It is the climate as well as
personal biography, temperament and individual position in context which shapes
the artist’s production. Ed Meneeley came to New York City
in 1955, encountering the New York
Biding his time, Meneeley found his way into the scene by cultivating his documentation skills, becoming a much-sought-after photographer. During this time he painted “dark, expressionistic figures” such as Green Thought in a Green Shade (1956), and “slashing, highly coloristic abstractions on unprimed canvas” such as Variations on a Story by Michael Katz (1958).
By the time of Meneeley’s entrance into
In 1958, frustrated by the circumstances of his context, Meneeley stopped painting. For the next two years, after his marriage was annulled and as his photographic career took off, he studied drawing with Jack Tworkov, repeating the same still life over and over again. Cavaliere sums up Meneeley’s early painting career well in these excerpts:
He was
simultaneously in analysis with a Jungian psychiatrist and also pursuing an important
dialogue about intuition and chance with Linda Cavallon, wife of Giorgio, the painter. In 1960 he
returned to painting with a series of color exercises inspired by Monet’s late lily ponds and began
experimenting with new processes, dripping color on linen canvases by use of a machine, producing
soft-edged vertical, ribbon-like dissections of multiple hues which, although they appear hand-made
and improvisational, are, in fact, mechanically produced and controlled. Paintings of the period point
emphatically toward future directions; their emphasis on vertical spatial motion and contrasting color
relationships, and their dialectic on machine manufactures/hand-made processes, rational/irrational
structuring exemplify Meneeley’s decisive concerns for coming years.
dialogue about intuition and chance with Linda Cavallon, wife of Giorgio, the painter. In 1960 he
returned to painting with a series of color exercises inspired by Monet’s late lily ponds and began
experimenting with new processes, dripping color on linen canvases by use of a machine, producing
soft-edged vertical, ribbon-like dissections of multiple hues which, although they appear hand-made
and improvisational, are, in fact, mechanically produced and controlled. Paintings of the period point
emphatically toward future directions; their emphasis on vertical spatial motion and contrasting color
relationships, and their dialectic on machine manufactures/hand-made processes, rational/irrational
structuring exemplify Meneeley’s decisive concerns for coming years.
With a
painting such as Black-Yellow Blues
(1964), edges begin to harden; then, in
Yellow-Green
Blues, painted soon after, the vertical becomes a clean-edged delineation, aided in its play for spatial
depth by Meneeley’s use of four-inch-deep stretcher, painted on the sides. The emphasis on deep
space achieved by vertical areas of contrasting color continues into the late sixties, exemplified at its
best by a large Untitled of 1966 in which an orange field interrupted by vertical areas of green,
violet, green vibrate with a resonance which overwhelms the eye.
Blues, painted soon after, the vertical becomes a clean-edged delineation, aided in its play for spatial
depth by Meneeley’s use of four-inch-deep stretcher, painted on the sides. The emphasis on deep
space achieved by vertical areas of contrasting color continues into the late sixties, exemplified at its
best by a large Untitled of 1966 in which an orange field interrupted by vertical areas of green,
violet, green vibrate with a resonance which overwhelms the eye.
Meneeley’s
method of research involves first getting to know theories of color and geometry, and
then putting them aside to work intuitively; main object, direct emotional communication rather than
philosophical truth. In paintings such as Black Took (1969) and Bridge (1969), he succeeds most
brilliantly in achieving his goal by using several verticals of unprimed canvas in interaction with matte
fields of black and ultramarine violet respectively in dialectical tension with one another.
then putting them aside to work intuitively; main object, direct emotional communication rather than
philosophical truth. In paintings such as Black Took (1969) and Bridge (1969), he succeeds most
brilliantly in achieving his goal by using several verticals of unprimed canvas in interaction with matte
fields of black and ultramarine violet respectively in dialectical tension with one another.
By the
mid-late 1960s Meneeley had spent over a decade of intentional practice, the
same amount of time Malcolm Gladwell reported to be true of many other highly successful
persons in his book Outliers.
Outside of his own world struggling with his aesthetic, African-Americans are finally granted the right to vote. Large-scale demonstrations have mounted in the streets against the
In 1969 Meneeley began making frequent excursions abroad whenever there was an opportunity to photograph a major show. Flights were cheap and with the American dollar going further against the pound, he was not only available at his own expense, but he had extra funds to support the artists he met by purchasing their work. Looking back, Meneeley explained:
At the time, the atmosphere in New
York
By then the Artist Club had
disbanded. Success had enabled artists
to travel and move away from the city. Cannibalization of artists, ideas and
values had reduced the community to commercialism. One could feel very isolated
and rejected, a price imposed on those who remained commercially redundant,
independent, or simply too poor to underwrite expansive concepts. Studio rents tripled, material costs doubled,
and rip-offs by artists replaced intellectual dialogue.
By this
time I had been making
works in NY for 8 years with no shows and no prospects in sight.
Projects were started and abandoned for lack of funds. I was very worried: all this starting and
stopping could wreck the artist and his work, and more importantly, wreck friendships with other
artists.
works in NY for 8 years with no shows and no prospects in sight.
Projects were started and abandoned for lack of funds. I was very worried: all this starting and
stopping could wreck the artist and his work, and more importantly, wreck friendships with other
artists.
Later I understood the change in
operation: the ‘50s were a time for searching, the ‘60s a time of development. You only had access to dealers and museums
via recommendation. It was firmly
established in the artists’ and public’s minds that if there was anything
worthwhile going on, it was surely in the galleries. If not, there was something wrong with the
art, the artist, or both.
Support and interest of European
artists in my free-standing works, and Brian Wall’s interest in the sculptures,
led me to reason that I had opportunities in Britain
and Europe . While
in NY I was chasing my tail, in Europe I could lecture
and teach.
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