studio visit

EVE SONNEMAN
interview by Rick Cunniff
artist portraits by Bruce Strong

 

Since the launch of her career in the Young Photographers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, Eve Sonneman has secured a unique position for herself in the world of contemporary art. Internationally renowned as a photographer, she has participated in the 1977 Documenta and in the biennales of Venice, Paris, Strasbourg, and Australia, has published five books, and has been the subject of 77 solo exhibitions. In her own words, quoted by poet David Shapiro in the catalogue of her mid-career retrospective at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1980, her photography responds to "gesture and innuendo and small changes." To Shapiro, "She is a painterly photographer [who] reminds us that photography, as with Man Ray and Rodchenko, must never be denigrated as mere materiality." In addition to her career in photography, Sonneman works in paint, making large abstractions, watercolors, and painted objects. Her distinctive, highly personal form of pointillism has been acutely characterized by the critic Klaus Kertess as "teeming with tiny, obsessively made, evanescengt rings congealing into a delicate and fugitive, floreate dew."

Eve Sonneman is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, and over 30 other museums around the world. Earlier in her career Sonneman was with Leo Castelli for twelve years and Sidney Janis for four years. Now she is with two New York galleries: Bruce Silverstein, for her photography, and Jadite, for her painting. Silverstein recently presented Eve Sonneman: Diptych, 1968-2002, which featured vintage prints and recent Poloroids in her distinctive paired-image format. Jadite, meanwhile, will show recent paintings and large-format Poloroids in April 2003.

Here she talks about her life and career with friend and collector Rick Cunniff, who is a financial editor at Morgan Stanley in New York.

Eve Sonneman Self-Portrait, Chicago, 1986,
cibachrome photograph, 20 x 30 inches,
courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York

Your photographs seem to capture very specific situations, often focused on people. Your paintings seem to be pretty much the opposite, trying to capture a more perfect universal feeling.

In photography I'm very interested in a tiny moment of gesture or innuendo and of change. It's a very tiny area that I've carved out in my photography that I feel is gentle, poetic, and delicate and reminds us of a passing moment and a new way to notice it. That's my area of photography. In painting I'm trying to grasp a larger universal feeling about nature, atmosphere, color, which is a much broader issue. I still try to maintain some of the delicacy of that innuendo, but it's a grander feeling. Of course, the photographs also took me 1/15th of a second, and a painting takes me three or four months. I bring that up just because it's a very realistic difference. One is more technical, the other more emotional.

But there are photographers who specialize in grand natural scenes like the Grand Canyon.

That's not me. Although some critics have said that I'm beginning to attain the sublime, and I hope that I can do that in the small gesture, I'm not aiming for anything similar to the opposite of my photographs, which would be Ansel Adams.

Who are some of your contemporaries that you admire?

Two of my favorite artists are Lawrence Wiener and Ed Ruscha, who showed for years with me at Castelli Gallery. I admire Ed for using words and images combined to make you think of another reality, and I admire Lawrence for being so poetic.

Does the current year differ from prior years in terms of your work or how you feel?

I feel a bit more sophisticated this year because I've had, for the first time ever, two one-person shows in New York City, first a show of paintings, watercolors, and painted objects that got a wonderful, deep review from a critic I have never met who really seemed to understand my entire life as an artist. And I had a show of 34 years of my photography and got two wonderful reviews that complimented my output and gave me a confidence that I had never felt before. It was recognition of a type that was more meaningful, and the public exposure brought a lot of old friends to give me fresh comments. I always learn a great deal during shows from people who have known me a long time and also from strangers. So I have learned a lot about myself and how my work is evolving, and I feel suddenly very free. I don't mean I will suddenly change my work, but it might be richer.

 

How do the seasons affect your mood and output?

I work very consistently and I'm usually pretty cheerful. But I find a great energy when I'm working outdoors, so spring, summer, and early fall I'm creating a lot of watercolors outside, which totally empties and frees my mind and enables me to make better photographs and better large paintings. Doing lots and lots of watercolors outdoors helps me to open up and move paint suddenly around, mix color suddenly. I lie down and watch the cloud formations drift by, hear the birds singing, my mind is free, and I'm moving colors around.

How do you feel about the following? You can answer in random thoughts or however you want.

Warhol's celebrity portraits
I love them and feel they're universally understood and beautiful.

Nan Goldin
I'm very moved by her deep human understanding of the underdog, the downtrodden, and I think she's very, very good.

Robert Mapplethorpe
He was actually a close friend. Now his work is seen as classical, but I think it's important to remember the shock value it had at the time. And that he opened up an amazing area of sexuality that wasn't revealed before. Very important to photography.

Martha Graham
I admire her for making forms out of the human body that we never really saw before.

Madonna
I admire her enormously for transforming herself. I met her at the very beginning, and I think she understood the history of cinema, still photography, costume design, and music, and transformed herself so many times, each time more miraculously. I admire her a lot.

Janice Joplin
Oh, I was crazy about Janice Joplin. I heard her live during the "summer of love" in Golden Gate Park when I was in graduate school, and I thought she was brilliant, very moving.

"Glamorous" art auctions like the one you recently attended, where a painting by your friend Ed Ruscha went for $3 million.
Maybe great fun for the public and in raising prices, but devastating to living artists. Can be, anyway.

Birds nests
I spent two years traveling around the world learning more and more about birds' nests and birds' houses for my book Where Birds Live, and it was a great adventure. I now can identify 90 different birds' nests as to what kind of bird lives there and how they were made. The interesting thing about birds' nests is that they are the only thing in nature that cannot be duplicated by a computer.

Mondrian
When I was a teenager I took drawing classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, and I always would stand for about 20 minutes in front of the Mondrians there and absolutely loved them. For a period from the age of 16 to about 24 he was my number one, favorite artist in the world. I also loved the aspect of clarity of his career. He began with the flower drawings, evolved into the tree, evolved into the tree in black, white, and gray, then into structure, then into structure with color. I think his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was one of the clearest, most exquisite developments from nature into pure abstraction. I admire him a great deal.

Alex Katz
I like his attention to detail, his meticulousness, the way he paints every eyelash.

continues...

 

 

Eve Sonneman Blue Time 2000, oil on linen, 70 x 37 inches, private collection, courtesy Jadite Gallery, New York

Eve Sonneman Mushrooms, Maine 1988, watercolor, 12 x 9 inches, courtesy Jadite Gallery, New York

Eve Sonneman Sunday Bathers, San Francisco 1968,
silver photograph, 11 x 16 inches,
courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York

Earlier in our conversation we were talking about liking Frank Lloyd Wright. Your paintings would look great in his homes. Can you describe qualities of his work that attract you?

Being from Illinois, Frank Lloyd Wright understood the prairie, and used that in creating the Prairie style. I'm from Chicago, so I understand both the city and the prairie. There's something he said that would answer your question: "You can learn as much about nature by studying a weed as a flower." I think that's a beautiful quote and has always reminded me to be observant of all elements of nature, not just the most exquisite. The more an artist grasps about nature and the evolving universe, the more they can put into new forms or new art. This morning I was in my garden observing a French lavender plant, which grows along the stem that was dead from last year, creating a new branch, new leaves. That's different from the way rosemary grows. So knowing this about French lavender, I can put a new form on a former structure, and I can actually help myself to grow.

Did your family play much of a role in your choice to become an artist, not necessarily directly, but in some way?

My grandfather was a well-known German poet and opera critic, and I always was very impressed by the way he spoke and put words together. My father is a very creative chemical inventor, and I was always amazed at the way he understood nature and used natural elements like plants as forms to invent chemical products. As an artist I'm very impressed by studying nature, coming to an understanding of gardens, herbs, cloud formations, atmosphere, and putting natural elements into the way I compose and create photographs and paintings.

Was any of that from your father teaching you, father to daughter?

No, it was me as a teenager working with him in his chemical lab on Saturdays, and I also designed all of the labels of his chemical products, out of love and also a way to help him. I think being around him during those times, since he is such a creative, self-taught inventor, probably had an effect on me in terms of forming ideas and melding ideas into a picture. So I never want to have a picture that doesn't contain an idea. That's something I also got from my education. In graduate school I had a very special teacher named Van Deren Coke who taught me that throughout history every important artistic movement and important artist had at least one unique concept, the way they formed an idea into a picture using a technique of their own. That's what I grasped from art history, and the history of photography in particular - that it's an important thing an artist should do.

How did you do in elementary school and in high school?

Because my father was a Holocaust survivor, he was very strict and it was imperative that we get very high grades, since education was the most important thing. In grammar school I entered an accelerated class. I had a very high IQ, and I was pushed to study extremely hard and get good grades. So I had a very high grade point average and got a scholarship to college and then a fellowship to graduate school.

Was school relatively easy?

Not it was very hard. I have always worked very hard.

Which subjects came most naturally?

Most naturally came art, poetry, and history. The most difficult was chemistry and physics, but I was able to do well and graduated with honors.

Most importantly, were you popular?

I was always popular. That's a funny question, but one of the things I learned as an undergraduate was that an artist's personality is supposed to be in their work, and that if you want your work to be popular, your personality has to be popular, too. You have to be funny and likeable in order to be popular, and your work has to have elements of that as well, which is a difficult thing, but it's something to strive for. One of the benefits to me of having two books published by Random House was having professional editors who educated me beyond graduate school in ways of placing pictures on pages and ways of communicating pictures to a mass audience, which is something I'm still learning about as an author. I guess I grasped something, since two of my five books were collected by 20,000 people each, but there is a great deal to learn in that area. In terms of images, I can only learn from historical people I admire, like Man Ray, Duchamp, Andy Warhol, people who have made images that excite the public and the media.

Do you believe in astrology.

I believe in astrology a little bit. The publisher of my second book, Roses Are Red, Martal Lawee, taught numerology at the University of Toronto and once did my numerology chart in the process of publishing my book. She predicted that four years from that moment, my work would change in format and become more brightly colored, and the subject would be more popular. And all those elements became true. I wrote down what she said and put it away in a box, and four years later I opened it. And all the elements were true. So I think there's something to be said about the specific minute and second in time that you arrive in the universe, and all aspects of where the stars are, where the sun is, what's creating the cycle of the universe at the moment you appear. All thing are affecting you, and then later as you evolve you begin to affect them or create them. So there is something very true. It's a person's orbit and also their aura. I can't say that much about it because I'm not a scientist, but having had it done by someone who is a scientist and having seen it come true, I do believe it.

What sign are you?

I'm a Capricorn, born January 14, 12:02 am.

Which kind of people do you prefer to be close to, naturally drawn to: people who are naturally funny; people who think like you and are interested in the same things; people who are extremely smart but not funny; glamorous people; artistic odd people; athletic, high energy people.

Mostly I'm drawn to people who are extremely intelligent and people who are funny.
Sometimes, if I'm lucky, they're the same people.

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