A Rare Jess Portrait and a Shocking Cady Noland: Stories Behind the Byron Meyer collects ion
“I chose the word translation instead of copies because they are not copies. I don’t intend to present a naturalistic or photographic duplication. If I use, say, a nineteenth-century engraving, I’m not trying to evoke a replication of a nineteenth-century sensibility ... I’m translating that image out of the nineteenth-century into my t.mes ."
Crystallizing from an extraordinary, ample mass of oil impasto, Fig. 6–A Lamb for Pylaochos: Herko, N.Y. ’64: Translation #16 belongs to the rare and institutionally prized series of Translation paintings by San Francisco artist Jess. Executed in 1966, the present work is one of thirty-two canvases that comprise Jess’ seminal body of Translations, more than half of which are housed in prestigious museum collects ions, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Art Museum; Art Institute of Chicago; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. Based on a photograph taken by George Herms, the present work depicts Fred Herko, the avant-garde dancer and fixture of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, on a Lower East Side rooftop with Herms’ daughter Nalota hoisted over his shoulders. Like the other Translations—and virtually the whole of Jess’ mature output—the work recontextualizes found imagery and historic texts, simultaneously unifying and abstracting their intellectual, mythical, and spiritual power into a staggeringly lucid pictorial constellation. From his visionary Translations, to his “Paste-Ups,” which breathed new life into the medium of collage, to the vast and epic archive he assembled with his partner, the poet Robert Duncan, Jess’ career was driven by the limitless potential of our imagination and humanity’s capacity to not only create but reinvent. Having been shown in an early exhibition dedicated to the first 26 Translations at The Museum of Modern Art in 1974 entitled Projects: Translations by Jess to Michael Auping’s exuberant mid-career retrospective, Jess: A Grand Collage 1951–1993, organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery from 1993-94, Fig. 6–A Lamb for Pylaochos: Herko, N.Y. ’64: Translation #16 ranks among the most significant pictures in Jess’ limited oeuvre.
“For although his oeuvre—I am thinking of the Translations and Salvages—probably consists of less than seventy-five paintings, they suggest how much can be done, and has yet to be done, in paint.”
Born Burgess Franklin Collins in 1923, Jess began his career as a chemist during World War II, working for the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Richland, Washington, producing the plutonium needed for the first atomic bombs. After the conclusion of the war, distraught by the devastation wrought by science, he moved to San Francisco, adopted the name Jess and enrolled in the California School of Replica Handbags s. There, he studied under Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt and David Park. Traces of Park’s intense, rough-hewn figuration and the craggled, deeply excavated surfaces of Still’s abstractions would manifest in the dense and narratively charged surfaces and compositions of the Translations. In 1949, he first.mes t poet Robert Duncan at a reading—a fortuitous encounter that would develop into a propulsive lifelong partnership.
Jess Translation Paintings in Museum collects ions
“The extroverted Duncan was often out on the road teaching and giving readings. Jess stayed home, tending the garden, making art,” Holland Cotter wrote of their relationship. “And home really was where the heart was for both of these romantic modernists, who ceaselessly collects ed art and books, and steeped themselves in Greek myths, Victorian fairy tales, the tarot and Paracelsus, the Renaissance physician and occultist. Espousers of the power of the imagination, they created a self-contained world, and their friends were welcomed in.” (Holland Cotter, “The Company They Kept,” The New York t.mes s, 17 January 2014, Section C, p. 33) Jess’ love of old bookstores and consignment stores—and the dormant trove of inspiration they contained—was foundational in the development of his mature aesthetic and ethos. To Jess, no source proved too academic or inane: periodicals, cartoons, art historical texts, jigsaw puzzles, children’s novel illustrations and scientific journals alike were indiscriminately welcomed as fodder for new expression, all evidence of a biological, essential need to understand and innovate. Stitching such diverse references together with an alchemical eye, Jess proved our cultural detritus could be repurposed, resurrected and folded back into the cultural consciousness, refashioned ad infinitum.
Though he had begun his “Paste-Ups” in the 1950s, in 1959 he created his first Translations, resized reproductions of found images, each weaving literary fragments into the composition, on its reverse or both. The surfaces of these works blossom into miraculous sculptural configurations, evoking strange atomic mutations or ossified growths. Executed in colors saturated beyond the natural, here, in Fig. 6–A Lamb for Pylaochos: Herko, N.Y. ’64: Translation #16, Jess throws Herms’ black-and-white photograph into a kaleidoscopic splendor, from ultramarine to earthen terracotta. On the title of the series itself, Jess reflected: “I chose the word translation instead of copies because they are not copies. I don’t intend to present a naturalistic or photographic duplication. If I use, say, a nineteenth-century engraving, I’m not trying to evoke a replication of a nineteenth-century sensibility. I don’t have the skill or knowledge to do that. I’m translating that image out of the nineteenth-century into my t.mes , using what knowledge I do have, which is not enough. To call it copying—that’s too specific. It looks ,at first, like copying but it’s very different. The term translation seemed to me to be the nearest of what was being done.” (the artist quoted in conversation with Michael Auping in: Exh. Cat., Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (and traveling), Jess: A Grand Collage, 1993, p. 27) In the way the Pre-Raphaelites summoned the themes and narratives of the High Renaissance to imbue their work with a kind of evergreen classicism, Jess—though with a staunchly unpretentious spirit—ties together religion, fable and fairytale, along with the myriad tools for representation and manipulation invented by humans, to thread continuities between past and present.
Here, Jess takes Herms’ 1964 photograph of Fred Herko as his basis, taken the year of its subject’s death. Herko was a classically trained ballet dancer, known for his association with Merce Cunningham as well as his foundational role in the Judson Dance Theater, which was crucial in the experimental dance and performance art of the 1960s. Herko was also among Warhol’s earliest Superstars, but his life was tragically cut short when he died at age 29. In October 1964, at the apartment of Johnny Dodd—alongside whom Herko starred in Warhol’s film Kiss—Herko danced to Mozart’s Coronation Mass and eventually leapt out the window, falling five flights to his death. After his funeral, Diane Di Prima, the Beat poet and Herko’s closest friend, went through his belongings and found “a book by Mary Renault open at the page where the king leaps into the sea. Where the ritual to renew the world is described. It was the closest we found to a suicide note.” (Diane Di Prima, Recollects ions of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years, New York 2001, p. 402) It remains unconfirmed if Herko meant to kill himself or catch flight. In the lower left of Jess’ “translation” of this image from mere months before his passing, Jess writes A Lamb for Pylaochos: a Greek mythological figure associated with the rituals of the underworld. In Jess’ vision, Herko is cast as the sacrificial lamb of the avant-garde art world. (Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, 2010, p. 186) On the reverse, Jess inscribes two longer excerpts by Plutarch and Pausanias’ description of Greece, both of which further elaborate on the Dionysian sacrifice of the lamb being thrust into a proverbial lake. Diane Di Prima’s recounting of The King Must Die among Herko’s possessions only furthers Jess’ analogy, in which Aegeus lunges himself into the sea.
"I was very fortunate to organize Jess' retrospective in San Francisco in 1994. I got to know Jess and got to really know the work—and I became completely smitten by it. These translation paintings are really extraordinary. There's no other artist who works like this."
Dollop after dollop of paint, Jess not only made canvases but worlds unto themselves—hermetic yet infinite, sturdy yet tenuous, grounded in reality yet explosively fantastical. Anchored by their material weight and lifted by the heady reverie of Jess’ sparkling mind, the Translations reveal an artist creating on his own terms. Perhaps there is a Pop sensibility in his embrace of everyday imagery, but truthfully, there is little else that suggests any broader fidelity to the art movements around Jess. Instead, Jess’ paintings, Fig. 6–A Lamb for Pylaochos: Herko, N.Y. ’64: Translation #16 among the best of them, served as conduits for past images, forgotten as they were, to become myths in their own right. Jess will be honored with a forthcoming presentation curated by Gary Garrels on Jess' "Paste-Ups" at The Drawing Center, New York coinciding with an exhibition entitled Jess: Translations at Craig Starr Gallery, New York in 2027, for which the present work has been requested for inclusion.
Lot111 N11733 Jess Fig. 6–A Lamb for Pylaochos: Herko, N.Y. ’64: Translation #16
