• Making Marks, making Times

     
    By April Richon Jacobs
  • Making Marks, Marking Time: Gloria Klein's paintings of the 1970s & ‘80s by April Richon Jacobs To discover the extraordinary...
    Photograph by Geoffrey Biddle ©️Geoffrey Biddle

    Making Marks, Marking Time: Gloria Klein's paintings of the 1970s & ‘80s

    by April Richon Jacobs

     

    To discover the extraordinary body of work the artist Gloria Klein created is to uncover a fascinating new realm, where a profusion of tiny, colorful marks creates sophisticated arrangements that seem to pulse with an inner light. These paintings openly display the process of their creation, making evident the obsessive activity with which they were made.

    Born in 1936 in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, Klein came of age in New York in the 1970s and played a vital role in organizing many artist-based initiatives in SoHo and the Lower East Side. She also participated in several ground-breaking activities for lesbian artists’ awareness, including A Lesbian Show, in 1978 and the “Lesbian Art and Artist” issue of Heresies, an early feminist art journal.

    Klein used a system of numerical factors to create complex patterns out of a limited set of colors. Working with a 60-inch square canvas, she placed a series of one-inch diagonal marks within a 60-inch grid, the colors of which were based on factors of sixty.

    These paintings are rooted in her early studies with the Conceptual artist Robert Barry at Hunter College between 1970 and ‘73. At Hunter, she also studied the phenomenological possibilities of color with the artist Robert Swain.

    Although her work shares certain affinities with both Minimalism and Color Field paintings, it is firmly rooted in a Conceptual practice that is predicated on a self-devised system, executed in a meticulous, time-consuming manner. Working within this rigid set of parameters paradoxically freed the artist to experiment with color, which, as the years progressed, she began to use more intuitively, creating shimmering, allover patterns that resemble woven textiles, needlepoint, stained glass, and the pointillist technique of Georges Seurat.
  • Gloria Klein: Beatiful Structures, Christie’s NYC. Photograph by Vivien Abrams

  • "I devised a system, the use of which grounded me and ordered my painting."

    Despite relying upon a rational system or framework in her paintings, however, there are small fluctuations in the length and width of each mark in Klein’s paintings. These subtle variations are a continual reminder of the physical presence of the artist’s hand and the “craft” of painting itself. In this case, seeing is believing. Encountering Klein’s hatch-mark paintings in person is breathtaking to behold. The slightly raised surface texture of each individual mark drives home the laborious, time-consuming process of their creation.

    Recent interest in the Pattern & Decoration movement brings Klein’s work to the forefront yet again. She was featured in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s With Pleasure; Pattern and Decoration in American Art catalog in 2019, and the Blanton Museum of Art exhibited her painting Yellow Dawn (1975) in their Expanding Abstraction exhibit the last Fail. In fact, Klein’s work was included in many of the early, seminal Patterns & Decoration exhibits in New York in the 1970s, including Pattern Painting at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) in November of 1977.


    Like so many women artists whose work refused to nearly again within the prevailing artistic trends, Gloria Klein struggled to gain recognition in the era in which she lived. “Having felt me to be an outsider”, she explained, in the 1970s, “I devised a system, the use of which grounded me and ordered my painting.”

  • Gloria Klein: Beatiful Structures, Christie’s NYC. Photograph by Vivien Abrams
  • Ironically, it was often the very movements that championed feminism that ended up excluding Gloria and her work. As a...
    Orange Pageantry, 1982.  Private Collection, Washington DC.

    Ironically, it was often the very movements that championed feminism that ended up excluding Gloria and her work. As a result, she often had trouble fitting into any one prevailing style or genre. Instead, Gloria’s paintings are resolutely her own.

     

     

    Her

     

    “To structure the canvas, I use a grid and horizontal lines,” Gloria declared in an artist’s statement from the 1970s. “To mask this uniformity, however, I use predetermined colors in a random way.”

     

    “I draw a grid of 1” square on the canvas. In each square, I placed a diagonal mark in ¼-inch tape and painted over the entire surface in a single color which varies from painting to painting. The tape is removed revealing white diagonal hatch marks which are then filled in with various colors. A standard 60-inch canvas, therefore, would contain a staggering 3,600 diagonal marks.

     

    These paintings are deeply rooted in a mathematical system. For a standard 60-inch canvas, Gloria used factors of 60 – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30 – to distribute the color, one at a time, according to its corresponding factor.

     

    Often complementary colors were placed alongside each other, with red next to green and so forth. “The brightest colors are put in first and spaced furthest apart. Other colors are then added and distributed according to the factors but many hatch marks are left blank at this stage”.

     

    As her paintings progressed, Gloria began to move away from the factor system and placed her colors more intuitively, a scintillating arrangement of candy-colored hatch marks on a blue ground, the placement of each color was decided at random. This was a time-consuming and laborious endeavor that could take weeks if not months to complete. It was largely based upon her own innate mastery of the intrinsic properties of color itself. “The end result is to stretch colors to their limits”, she explained, “examining how different colors work in different situations”.

  • Gloria Klein: Beatiful Structures, Christie’s NYC. Photograph by Vivien Abrams
  • Untitled 34, c. 1975. Collection Gloria Klein Archive.
  • Origins
    Blue Fields, 1981. Collection Gloria Klein Archive.

    Origins

    Gloria Klein is a native New Yorker, born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, during the postwar boom of the early 1950s. Among her myriad influences, she recalls her father’s career as a wallpaper hanger as having a formative impact on her work. It was Gloria who judge whether or not the enamel paint that her father mixed together actually matched the wallpaper’s exact hue. In the 1970s, Gloria attended Hunter College, taking classes with the Conceptual artist Robert Barry. Barry encouraged her to think about the set of systems in which society and the world around us are organized. For Klein, this may have guided her toward developing the systems that she used to structure her paintings. Ironically, using a system of predetermined parts freed her up, allowing her to experiment with newer and more elaborate color variations and greater and more intricate patterning.

     

    Also at Hunter, Klein was introduced to the phenomenological possibilities of color and its relationships by the artist Robert Swain. Swain was a longtime member of what would become the “Hunter Color School”, which took a meticulous, scientific approach to color by investigating how it is visually perceived. The optical quality of pure color had also been explored in the 1960s by Color Field artists, such as Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, and Kenneth Noland. Ellsworth Kelly’s early experiments with color seem particularly apt to Gloria’s work but were necessary a known influence on her paintings.

     

    Gloria Klein would go on to claim ownership over the succinct diagonal marks that have become her signature, declaring in 1977: “I wanted my own identity.” She continued to create these extraordinary paintings throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, with her canvases taking on ever greater, and more elaborate patterning. She creates a pixilated display of vibrant and pulsating color, where the individual one-inch hatch marks have been replaced by full-color one-inch squares, arranged with the improvisatory flair of a jazz musician. “She tried to push the limit of what each square of the graph could hold,” the scholar Rachel Beaudoin explained. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Gloria’s work would become associated with the Pattern & Decoration movement of the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

  • A Host of Pansies, 1978. Private Collection, Washington DC.
  • Pattern & Decoration
    Gloria Klein: Beatiful Structures, Christie’s NYC. Photograph by Vivien Abrams

    Pattern & Decoration

    The Pattern & Decoration movement of the late 1970s has been described as “the last genuine art movement of the Twentieth Century.” In a sense, P&D was a natural outgrowth of mostly women artists who opted to reject the “emptying out” of Modernist painting that had been championed by the art critic Clement Greenberg in the 1960s. Greenberg insisted that a painting adheres only to the a priori elements of its own makings – flat canvas and pigment. Early supporters of P&D, like the art critic Amy Goldin, knew that Greenberg’s reductivist parameters could not stand: “Artists are not notably renunciatory – they don’t give up anything they want,” she declared in Arts magazine in 1966.”

    The P&D artists we're a tight-knit group, based in New York and California, whose members were largely women, including Valerie Jaudon, Miriam Schapiro, and Joyce Kozloff. Together they embraced color, pattering, and the traditional handcrafts of “women’s work” like ceramics, quilting, wallpaper, and tapestries. Often childhood memories served as source material, with influences seemingly everywhere – on carpets, on walls, printed fabric, Persian miniatures, trips to the department store, or a visit to Grandmother’s house. “Everything”, as Robert Kushner explained, “that was left out of Janson's History of Art.”

    Although her paintings were included in many of the early, important P&D exhibits, including Pattern Paintings at P.S.1 in November 1977 and Decorative Art Recent Work at Douglass College Art Gallery at Rutgers University in November of 1978, Gloria was often excluded from what she considered to be a “cliquish” group. Perhaps, as a result, her work did not appear in any of the P&D exhibits after 1978.

    Around that time, Gloria’s work became associated with the Criss-Cross art collective out of Boulder, Colorado. Criss-Cross was a rather quirky movement that championed the democratizing effects of pattern painting especially its reliance upon a non-hierarchical system.

  • This was in line with their origins as a rural, hippie commune in 1963 and their collective vision of a...
    Construction with Four Windows, 1982. Collection Gloria Klein Archive.

    This was in line with their origins as a rural, hippie commune in 1963 and their collective vision of a cooperative society. Although Gloria never belonged to the commune her work was often included with Criss-Cross because it was visually similar to those in their group, such as George Woodman. George and Betty were close personal friends with Gloria, and she often stayed with them when participating in exhibits in Boulder.

    The system that Gloria adopted for use in her work was a deeply personal one. Its origins date back to the summer of 1970, stemming from a series of interpersonal relationships that had troubled her at the time. In speaking with the sculptor Mary-Ann Unger in 1978; Gloria revealed this, the fascinating origin story behind her use of diagonal hatch marks. It indicates the rejection she felt on a personal level and even the proto-feminist motivations that spurred her on: “I began inventing this system in the summer of 1970, not because I felt organized, but because I was angry.

    I was sharing a beach house with people who irritated me – and worse, I didn’t even have a place to paint. So, I sat around and drew. I would strike out on graph paper with jabbing marks. …[D]iagonals are like striking out at someone or something… [and] I think in this situation the diagonals somewhere reflect my anger at the people who were around me at the time. … I felt isolated and was in a controlled rage doing the hatch marks on graph paper.

    Gloria’s technique is revealed in a series of works on paper from the 1970s, many of which featured these slashing diagonal marks. A select group of these drawings was titled after women she either knew or knew of, including Gertrude Stein, Kate Millett, and the artist Joyce Kozloff.

  • Gloria Klein: Beatiful Structures, Christie’s NYC. Photograph by Vivien Abrams

  • “This shift was tied to her search for an authentic artistic voice, and it had a freeingeffect.”

    From a personal standpoint, the series of diagonal marks that Gloria came to develop cannot be prized apart from the era in which they were created. “With this system, I created and order in my paintings that satisfied my need to mark time [and] to place myself”. Indeed. Gloria had found a way to situate herself within a world that didn’t necessarily always welcome her. The curator Rebecca Lowery, writing in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art catalog With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, from 2019, summarized these effects, writing: “[This] shift was tied to her search for an authentic artistic voice, and it had a freeing effect.”

     

    In early 1978, Gloria includes one of her signature hatch mark paintings in A Lesbian Show at 112 Greene Street, curated by Harmony Hammond. This collaborative event proved to be one of the seminal moments in the history of queer artists' relevance. “Because of attitudes in this society towards lesbians,” Hammond wrote in the exhibit’s brochure, “there were some women who felt that they could not participate, and some were forced to withdraw. … Hopefully, this exhibition will begin to dissolve the isolation of lesbian artists as well as give visibility to the work.”

     

    Gloria was also included in the “Lesbian Artists” issue of Heresies in the Fall of 1977.

  • Gloria’s slow and methodical application of thousands of minute marks helped her to “right the ship,” slowing down time and...
    Gloria Klein: Beatiful Structures, Christie’s NYC. Photograph by Vivien Abrams

    Gloria’s slow and methodical application of thousands of minute marks helped her to “right the ship,” slowing down time and establishing a rational order over things. As an artistic practice, her slow, methodical application of countless individual marks can be compared to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets, which she has painted, off and on, since the 1950s. Like Gloria, Kusama is single-minded and unrelenting in painting the Infinity Nets, which she has described as stemming from the hallucinations that had plagued her since childhood – and a subsequent feeling of depersonalization, being detached from reality. So, too, did Louise Bourgeois contend with the legions of personal memories and trauma of her childhood in the series of over two hundred drawings she produced between November 1994 and June 1995, that has become known as the Insomnia Drawings.

     

    In the 1980s, Gloria’s paintings became even more ornate. As the years progressed, she began to combine her signature diagonal hatch-marks with longer diagonal lines of the same ¼-inch width but stretched out like thin streaks of light or skeins of yarn. She paired these with squares of varying sizes and colors. It is in these paintings of the 1980s that Gloria’s innate mastery of color, pattern and design comes into its own.

     

    Gloria Klein’s work does not neatly align with any one artistic practice, but instead shares affinities with many of the radical movements coming out of New York in the 1970s. Her paintings are indebted to the Pattern & Decoration Movement and the legacy of “women’s work,” with its obsessive mark-making.

     

    Their shimmering, tessellated Manuscripts and Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. Conceptually, they are rooted in her early studies with Robert Barry and Robert Swain at Hunter College. Above all, her powerful body of work demonstrates her remarkable talent for inventing, and sustaining, her own, unique artistic vision.