The
Result of His Need
Tracey O'Shaughnessy in conversation with CHARLES
CAJORI
This article originally
appeared in the Waterbury Republican-American
Charles Cajori Exchange
1994
oil on linen, 54 x 40 inches
all images
courtesy the artist
"Do you paint?"
asks Charles Cajori.
He is standing near a hydrant-size
electric heater in the middle of a drafty Litchfield gallery, his long,
El Greco fingers tucked into the front pockets of his jeans.
His visitor shakes her head.
"Mmm," mutters
Cajori, appraisingly. He nods his head, "Lucky."
Talent, as the celebrated Watertown artist knows, can be a trial. It
is not as much a burden as an impulse, an itchy, insistent urgency that
sees dynamism in the invisible and potency in the dormant. For nearly
70 years, Cajori has wrestled with that need. But ask him to articulate
it and he either cannot or will not.
The artist, a second-generation
Abstract Expressionist whose works are in the collections of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Whitney Museum of Art, has a retrospective
at the New Arts Gallery in Litchfield, a renovated barn to whose chilly
air Cajori's work brings a kinetic heat.
"Painting is the result
of some kind of need," says Cajori, a tall, reedy 82-year-old with
penetrating cerulean eyes and a wide, gap-toothed smile. "It's
a need to fill up some void in oneself, which I think is a nicer way
of putting it than that it's a gift. It isn't a gift. It's something
fought for. ... If you can avoid it, do."
Cajori slips his hand from
his pocket and gestures in the frosty air. He cups his hand in a semi-circle,
holding it out in front of him, as if in a caress. As he does so, he
explains what he has called "the swift continuum," a space
he says is created by movement. For Cajori, the picture plane is like
a pond. Put a figure in the pond, and the ripples that curl through
the water change.
Cajori tries to capture that
current but in a more psychological way. For him, that current is the
tension that occurs when different figures approach, retreat and evade
one another. It is shattering, sensual, shearing and transforming. "Cajori,"
art historian Irving Sandler wrote in 1961, "seems to be trying
... to strike the perfect balance between freedom and discipline, ambiguous
flux and calm, clear structure."
Charles Cajori Untitled
2003
monotype, 7-1/4 x 9 inches
Forty years later, Cajori
is still fighting for the harmony that comes from dissonance. His works
have a frenzy that is at once jarring and deeply tranquil. His more
recent works, most of which are untitled, are agitated collisions of
figures that are at once poised and unruly. Cajori's is a theater of
lacerating dialogue underscored by a sublime harmony. It is a place
of peaceful, penetrating confusion. For Cajori, who is always called
Cajori, never Charles and never Charlie, the plane of creativity resembles
some kind of mythic sphere where the goddesses of figure and space are
in constant conflict.
"Do you see that picture
there," Cajori says, pointing to a canvas of three female figures
colliding in a citrus-hued web.
"I worked on that for
10 years. It's been through many, many transformations. But you decide
that there's going to be a shape with colors here and you look at it
and you have to answer two questions. The first is the figure and the
second is the space for the figure. And what happens is, you have the
figure and she says, 'You can't do this to me,' and on the other hand,
the space says, 'Look, we're not living in a perspectival world. We're
living in a fluid and ambiguous world.' It's between these two forces
that one tries to find decisions."
Being with Charles Cajori
is a little like following the migration of an intellectual moth that
can't keep itself out of the flame of ideas. Cajori is as apt to cite
existential philosophers as he is to mention John Coltrane, Philip Guston
or "Epistrophy," one of Thelonious Monk's jazz classics and
the title of Cajori's painting on display at the Mattatuck Museum.
Charles Cajori Untitled
2002
oil on panel, 12 x 9 inches
His is a searching, bracing
intellect that produces conversations that veer on the edge of abstruseness
before plunging assuagingly in the familiar.
"It's like having a
life force around you," says Cajori's wife, the painter Barbara
Grossman. "Sometimes it's exhausting. But there's nothing worse
than artists who do the same thing over and over ad nauseum. It's being
able to mine that thing that you are involved in. And he's very, very,
alive and the work is an exploration of that battle."
Cajori acknowledges that
his painting does not always come fluently. Already this year he has
been beset by a fit of artistic block that, though not paralyzing, elicited
an emotional scarring with which he is familiar. "This process
involves a lot of destruction," he says. "What was it Picasso
said? Art is a series of destructions.
"You have a blank canvas," says Cajori, waving his hand across
the air hypnotically. "The options are infinite. Why is it that
you choose to do this and this and this? From where do those decisions
come? It's very mysterious. The question becomes whether the decisions
are authentic. That's the big struggle. Because it's easy to be deluded."
Cajori has been deluded before.
Raised outside Philadelphia to a biochemist father, Cajori's mother
had studied piano at Juilliard before deciding she would never make
it as a classical pianist. Instead, she taught music and ran a school.
Cajori does not want to make too much of his parent's influence or lack
of it on his work. But there is no denying that his painting has a throbbing
lyricism to it that roughly mirrors his own infatuation with jazz. Cajori
can remember with astonishing detail listening to Monk and Coltrane
at the Five Spot on the Lower East Side, where artists like himself
drank 37-cent beers and ordered sandwiches from the deli across the
alley. At 82 years old, Cajori can still hum the notes and recall the
dramatic rests between musical stanzas that Monk used to climactic effect.
Cajori began painting while
in high school, influenced by regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton.
He looks back on those early works as gauzy with sentimentality. He
refers to a mural he did for his local high school as "very good
and rather corny."
He was studying art at Cleveland
Art School before he was drafted into the Air Force. He was stationed
stateside and entered Columbia University on the G.I. Bill until he
saw a Picasso retrospective that "blew my mind," he says.
Aware that modernists were flocking to the Bowery, he left Columbia
for the Lower East Side, where he sublet an apartment on Cornelia Street
for $15 a month, and taught twice weekly at a Catholic girls school
in Baltimore to subsidize his painting. "It was tremendously exhilarating,"
he says. "And I worked completely abstractly for two or three years."
Charles Cajori The
Game 2000
oil on linen, 60 x 78 inches
But he found the sincerity
of the work lacking, he said. "I began to feel there was no place
for my decision making except taste: Did it look good, rather than did
it have ..." Cajori's eyes dart across the gallery searchingly,
"traction?"
n 1952, Cajori and four other
artists, Lois Dodd, Angelo Ippolito, Fred Mitchell and William King
-- a group Cajori describes as "all marginal people" - rented
a storefront gallery on East 10th Street for $45 a month to exhibit
something other than the European abstraction and American Regionalism
that was then monopolizing New York galleries. The Tanager Gallery became
a springboard for these artists to some of the tonier uptown galleries
and museums. Artists like Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Jackson
Pollock would careen into celebrity. Cajori remained on the second tier
of American painters, a "second-generation" Abstract Expressionist
in the mind of critics.
What set him apart was the
classical training and fastidious draftsmanship that had always marked
him as an artist. Two or three years after falling into the opiate of
Abstraction, Cajori awoke to a more figurative modernism.
Art critic Louis Finkelstein
once wrote that Cajori's work "occup(ied) a middle ground between
orderly structure and the flux of existence." That tension can
strike some observers as ambivalence; Cajori prefers to see it as tension.
As Vivien Raynor wrote in The New York Times of a Cajori exhibit in
1980, "Onlookers wearied by the cerebral, the illustrative and
the photographic are likely to be refreshed by the way this painter
draws and paints simultaneously with his brush, creating a kind of broth
in which objects hang as if emulsified."
"I can't give something
that is non-figurative the same intensity," says Cajori, who was
awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001. "The grouping of the figures
means there's a spatial tension between them. It is that tension between
the figures that interests me."
Nearly all of Cajori's figures
are women, most involved with other women in ambiguous, often erotic
ways. Cajori has said that what attracts him is not simply the gesture
a woman makes, but the "dynamic inside the figure" that comes
just before the motion - the move she might make.
"My work has always
been fighting the war between space and figure," Cajori says. "That's
the battleground that one enters. The paintings evolve and therefore
the battle must change. These are not simple works. They are complicated.
It takes a long time to look at them."
But Cajori does not make
apologies for creating visually challenging works. To him, the stakes
are high and the bar keeps rising. He cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the
existentialist philosopher who wrote that art is "the act of bringing
truth into being."
Painting, Cajori paraphrased,
"is probably the most important human activity because there's
no translation. Writers have to use words, so they are one step away
from authenticity. ... The only reason for painting is to try to deepen
the questions and fight for them."
