Richard Brown Lethem and the Heroism
of Contemporary Painting

by Rick Moody

Recently, I was gallery hopping with a conceptual artist friend in Chelsea, when we came upon a work, in a rather celebrated venue, that amounted to the following: an ordinary blue balloon, inflated, affixed to the gallery floor. From the wall of the gallery, a small square of light was projected onto the surface of this balloon. The balloon didn’t move, didn’t activate in any mechanical way, nor did the light circumnavigate it. Doubtless, the balloon was to be removed in time for the next show in the space, but in the meantime, it was just there. A discussion between my friend and myself ensued, a discussion that still seems to be going on, about whether or not this machined approach to expression was of the same order of business as, for example, a painting. While it’s not impossible that my resistance to the balloon amounts to parochial idiocy, from which I may one day awake, I feel less uncertain about a later installment of the discussion, at the recent Whitney Biennial, during which the same friend said, “Well, I don’t really know what painting is for these days.”

In the contemporary instant, according to this view, painting doesn’t do what it once did, which is depict, narrate, illuminate, and suggest the painter’s hand, with the kind of alchemical imagination we associate with other heroic arts, epic poetry, sagas, concerti, symphonies. Maybe, my friend seemed to be suggesting, this kind of a painting is no longer possible. The kind of painting in which the transformative imagination is suggested in hand-made investigations of light and pigment. Maybe these kinds of effects are no longer important to visual media?

Wherever there’s a negation, there’s an affirmation in utero, and in the work of Richard Brown Lethem, in the career of Richard Brown Lethem, we see just this sort of affirmation of painting as an endeavor, painting as a heroic journey, an affirmation that challenges and makes ridiculous contemporary neglect, while ratifying in the process the traditions and imperatives of painting’s long, august history.

The broad outlines of the career of Richard Brown Lethem are not unknown. My summary is therefore necessarily brief: trained in Kansas City and New York, he traveled in Paris, he exhibited in New York at the tail end of the AbEx period, he flirted with New York surrealism, he dropped out of university life. For a time, he painted figuratively. And then, in the eighties, Lethem began his metamorphosis into a painter of heavily symbolized and somewhat narrative expressionism. Despite the art historical contours of his career, the esteemed writer Jonathan Lethem, the artist’s son, has described the journey of his father’s work as a kind of resistance to authority, and you do feel that in the movement through his many approaches to the form, but I would also add that in my experience there is a moral frankness to the work that is challenging and quite profound.

By moral frankness, I mean, e.g., a recognition of what violence signifies (c.f., the overpowering image called “The Beekeeper Panics,” from 1985, or “Trueblood Trips Up,” from the same year), or a simultaneous despair about its ubiquity. Lethem the Elder resists easy categorizations, and he is uneasy with interpretations that limit access to the painterly implications of what he does, and yet he has written, “Cézanne was practicing Catholic. It would be difficult if not futile to analyze his work on that basis, but, still, it is there.” Perhaps this is another way of saying: yes, there is furious and beautiful paint handling in these canvases; yes, there is gestural simplicity, and an attention to mixed and ambiguous planes colliding as a web for tragicomic figures, but these painterly aspirations also collide with a sensibility that is hard not to call literary. As in the Old Masters of the Northern Renaissance, everything in Lethem’s work means something, even if it’s in the rear of the image or partially concealed. He’s a liable to be using Rilke or Berryman in the construction of an image as he is to be using Gorky or Kandinsky, to speak of two eminent painters who seem to me to inform his palette of ambitions.

The catalogue at hand means to collect works with a specific iconography, which is to say images of the painter’s childhood in the Midwest. The artist’s father, a salesman, turns up in a pair of images, as does a notorious lynching in Lethem’s hometown not long before his birth. There are prairie dogs in abundance, American machinery abounds, as well as, for variety’s sake, a few allusions to his current Down East residence. As regards the contemporary national rampage in the Mideast, we find the melancholy “Crossroads” and “Pit and Parade.” Since puns and turns of phrase are important to Lethem, it’s not impossible that Midwest and Mideast are adjacent for their euphonious similitude in English.

A brief survey of images might suggest where Lethem is now, or has been lately, but for me the most heroic feature of the work is how much it delights in its own resilience and survival over the course of decades, how much it delights in its multifary and its polyphony, in light and color, without, as it were falling into, on the one hand, the sentimentality of realism, and, on the other, the ephemeral qualities of the conceptual. What is painting for, my abovementioned friend recently asked? Painting is an illusion, an act of the imagination that is at once recombinant and displaced from the world as is, the better to describe it. And yet the more painting draws attention to its material, its gesture, the better and more genuine does it seem to be. Lethem’s oeuvre is nearly without peer in terms of how quietly and fervently is has been practiced, all the while crafting extraordinarily heartfelt depictions of the bumbling and failing of humankind. Lethem is an artist acute in heart and eye, likewise gentle, probing, restless, unflinching. Which is exactly and precisely heroic, in a world of temporarily inflated balloons.