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He reminded me, as I sometimes watched him gooff to his classes, or his studio, walkingalong Main Street overlooking the lake, of "theold man who does as he pleases," the poet LuYu. Not that he was a poet, nor that he didwhat he pleased; for no one can in the coldsnows of the former lands of the Senecas. But Icame to understand that he painted as hepleased. I first met him in 1987, eccentric ina painterly way, a lower-Manhattan bohemian ofthe 1960's who had been driven by fate and thecondition of the painter in a democraticconsumer publicity society to seek out hisliving in a place where the arts were acceptedon the utilitarian principles that they can betaught and therefore be defined useful andmorally elevating, in other words, a college.He at that time worked in the former attic ofan upper-class summer residence donated to theColleges. As former palaces turned intomuseums, so this summer place turned into athree-season art department. We shared theattic for a while and I learned he was thatrare species in the post-1960's art world, aliterate painter, something he shared withMotherwell. I would walk over to hisbookshelves and realize we'd read the samebooks at about the same time. We were both, Ifelt, refugees from the days before theanti-cultural revolution, 1968, that is.But I should talk about his painting. I wasused to non-representational painting. I wasused to the New York school, I had seen itbecome "classic," very tame in museums, and hispainting did thus not strike me as unusual. Histeacher had been Hans Hofmann, whose paintingsI did not particularly like. Nor did the earlyLoftuses strike me in any particular sense asoriginal: they seemed to me too much ofprecisely the New York school which was not, ofthe past. But then something must have happenedto the old man, who ceased to paint like hismaster and began to paint like himself. I thinkit was Upstate that did it. All that snow, andall those trees, and I could see he was gettingobsessed by trees, light and dark, uttersimplicity, getting away from too much color,getting away from those damn squares. The manfrom the city was being naturalized: Upstatewas catching him up even as he, under my veryeyes, began to turn Chinese. He even walkedlike a Chinese, probably because of hissandals. But he also turned, it seemed to me,whiter and I imagined him as a sage along ariver bank, by a bamboo grove, fishing. But henever fished; he just painted. And his paintingturned into that unique style which arthistorians of the future will have to callUpstate Chinese. It is not that he began topractice with brush, ink, and paper, that hetried calligraphy, that he went towards moreand more purity, but he came, it seemed to me,more and more under the power of the physicallandscape. He became one with the landscape, hemerged into the great all, and I understood whythere were no figures in his pictures, not evena dot of a man or woman. Thus he entered hislast great phase, though not the last of hislife, but of his work up to now: like a trueclassic he ends with the four seasons, andthese are not the infinity or emptiness of Zen,in spite of his Chinese obsession, but thereconciliation of nature and art, an overcomingof the New York School rejection, to attainserenity and acceptance.
Remy Saisselin
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