G

Gabo, Naum

(5 August 1890–23 August 1977; b. Naum Neemia Pevsner)

Born in Russia, Gabo studied medicine and engineering in Germany before returning to his homeland in 1920. Back in Russia, he joined his older brother Antoine Pevsner (1886–1962) in drafting a Realistic Manifesto (1920) that established the principles of what became European Constructivism, in contrast to the CONSTRUCTIVISM that VLADIMIR T ATUN, among others, advocated in Russia. While in Russia, Gabo made Virtual Kinetic Volume (1920, also known as Kinetic Sculpture), a vibrating strip of steel that is customarily identified as the first artwork to incorporate a motor. Taking transparency to a higher level, his later sculptures defined space not with volumes but by a frame of uniquely curved lines that became his SIGNATURE. Objecting to the Soviet government’s regimentation of artistic activities, Gabo moved west, first to BERLIN, then to Paris and to England, until he came to the United States in 1946, becoming an American citizen in 1952. Once in America, Gabo worked inventively with strings strung within a frame in a series titled Linear Construction (1942–43), while specializing in monuments, which often remained proposals, and monumental sculptures for new buildings.

Galton, Francis

(16 February 1822–17 January 1911)

One of the most fecund inventors of the late 19th century, he incidentally discovered in the 1880s the departure of composite photography by taking several exposures of the same person and then printing them superimposed, their eyes becoming the constant peg, to make an image unavailable not only to normal vision but also to ordinary photography. During his long life Galton also explored meteorology (inventing the first weather map), psychology (identifying SYNAESTHESIA), acoustics, anthropology, statistics, and genetics. While most of Galton’s work was readily acceptable, as honors including a British knighthood were bestowed on him, the proto-utopian novel that he wrote in the last year of his life went unpublished for a century. Though a niece reportedly destroyed parts that she found objectionable, Kantsaywhere has since appeared, much like other lost literature, online (2011), to be recognized as precursor to a certain strain of science fiction.

Gance, Abel

(25 October 1889–10 November 1981)

Initially an actor, Gance made unsuccessful short silent films before returning to the stage. Resuming his film career during World War I, he experimented with close-ups and tracking shots, which were at the time thought to be confusing techniques. By 1917, according to the film lexicographer Ephraim Katz (1932–92), “He was considered important enough as a director for his picture to appear ahead of the stars in a film’s title sequence. This was to become a personal trademark of all Gance’s silent films.”

He made the first major film about the horrors of the Great War, J’accuse/I Accuse (1919) with footage he shot with real soldiers in real battles, for successful release just after Armistice Day. His technique of quickly cutting from scene to scene, from horror to horror, influenced filmmakers coming of age at that time.

After the commercial failure of La Roue (1923), which began as thirty-two reels (over five hours) before being abridged to twelve, he made his most stupendous film, Napoleon (1927), which remains a monumental masterpiece. Initially an epic on the scale of D. W. G RIFFITH’s Intolerance (1918), it is also technically innovative. The concluding sections of the film were shot by three synchronized cameras to be shown simultaneously on three screens, in a technique resembling C INERAMA, which came thirty years later. When these additional images appear, toward the end of the film, they produce a gasp of awe, even decades later. Other parts were shot in two-camera 3-D and in color, but not used. Unfortunately, this Gance film failed commercially. One source reports that the three-screen format was seen in only eight European cities. The version shown at the time in America was so drastically butchered it was incomprehensible. Several years later, Gance recorded stereophonic sound effects that he wanted to add to the master print.

Beginning in the 1930s, he made melodramas on familiar historical subjects (e.g., Lucrezia Borga, Beethoven, Cyrano, and D’Artagnan). Only in the 1970s, thanks to the culturally responsible Hollywood director Francis Ford Coppola (1939), was the original three-screen version of Napoleon made available to American audiences. When I saw it at Manhattan’s immense Radio City Music Hall, it knocked me out. Though Gance lived long enough to see his innovations exploited elsewhere, he was never again encouraged to make innovative film.

Gangemi, Kenneth

(23 November 1937)

An early MINIMALIST writer, Gangemi published a “novel” called Olt (1969) that was only sixty pages long. It was written not as a sequence of paragraphs but as a collection of highly resonant sentences, all about a man with minimal emotional affect. His next book, Lydia (1970), has even more severe fictions, some of them merely listings of elements in a narrative; certain poems consist of only a single word. He has also published prose poems, a novel in the form of an unrealized film script (The Interceptor Pilot, 1980), and a memoir of traveling in Mexico (Volcanoes from Puebla, 1979). A friend of mine for a half-century, he has worked for decades on a mammoth novel about a single day in New York City in the late 1990s, implicitly acknowledging the precedence of JAMES JOYCE’s ULYSSES.

Gardner, Martin

(21 October 1914–22 May 2010)

A truly independent writer for most of his life, noted mostly for his books about science and pseudoscience, Gardner also became incidentally a primary scholar of truly eccentric literature, beginning with his elaborately annotated and introduced editions of Lewis Carroll: The Annotated Alice (1960) and The Annotated Snark (1962), the latter dealing with the more daunting Carroll text. Furthermore, some of Gardner’s appreciations of O ULIPO, among other avant-garde writers mentioned here, appeared in his regular column in Scientific American, illustrating the instructive principle that literacy about advanced science might be good preparation for understanding advanced literature, and vice versa.

Otherwise, Gardner’s The New Ambidextrous Universe (1964) influenced, among others, VLADIMIR N ABOKOV, who mentions the book on page 542 of his novel Ada (1969). In 1992, when JOHN R OBERT COLOMBO edited an anthology of stories less than fifty words long, he sent copies to several like-minded enthusiasts, asking in part for suggestions for a future edition. In reply the most nominations came from Martin Gardner.

On the other hand, his The Night Is Large (1996), erroneously subtitled “Collected Essays,” demonstrates the breadth and depth of Gardner’s intellectual concerns. Much like other widely published magazine writers, he wrote clearly and cleanly. Only H. L. MENCKEN, among modern essayists, ever published as many books that are essentially collections of essays. As no one else on such a variety of daunting subjects, his intellectual range was perhaps unrivaled.

Don’t be surprised to find that no other book about contemporary art or writing honors his name.

Figure 5 Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló.

Photo by Rob Tallia.

Figure 6 Casa Batlló Roof.

Photo by Rob Tallia.

Gaudí, Antoni

(25 June 1852–10 June 1926)

By the measure of images alone, Gaudi was the most original architect of early modern times. Influenced by Catalonian philosophers who glorified earlier Spanish arts and crafts, Gaudi developed a taste for undulating lines, ornamental details, ornate additions, compelling materials, and colorful paint –all in sharp contrast to the austere esthetic that later informed the streamlined International Style. For instance, Gaudi’s Church of the Sagrada Familia (1883–1926, Sacred Family) has three open doorways leading to four towers intertwined at their bases, their diagonal spires rising to a height over 100 meters. At the top of each tower is an ornate echo of a flower. Though Gaudi worked on it for four decades, this church was unfinished at his death and thus more interesting for suggesting what additionally he might have done.

Established in the Catalonian city of Barcelona, Gaudi distributed his buildings all over the city to give it a personal architectural definition perhaps unique in the Western world. Literally, his architecture is everywhere –not only in the famous church but in apartment houses, private mansions, a municipal park, and other buildings. Striking in pictures, his buildings are even more impressive before your eyes, especially in Barcelona where I saw them in the 21st century.

Also important in Gaudi’s history are his proposals that weren’t accepted. Especially suggestive is one from 1908 for a New York hotel that, had it been completed, would have looked different from every other hotel there, not to mention other buildings, even more than a century later. Visionary he was, to a higher degree.

One Gaudi assumption, made particularly clear in his later years, was that, whereas the straight line belonged to man, the curved line was God’s. Because Gaudi’s style is so eccentric, it had scarce acceptance and scattered influence. Curiously, the later masterpiece most resembling Gaudi’s esthetic is the Los Angeles Watts Towers of SIMON R ODIA, an Italian-American handyman who may or may not have known of Gaudi’s work. Too bad he didn’t survive long enough to work in LAS VEGAS.

Gender

Along with the general acceptance of homosexuality and bisexuality (among other behaviors previously regarded as “deviant”), the avant-garde has long stretched the notion of gender. Famous female avant-garde artists have adopted male attire (G ERTRUDE S TEIN, for one), while others, both male and female, have created their own unisexual image (A NDY W ARHOL). This has degenerated in pop culture into “gender-bender” fashions –from the “moptop” long-haired male rock stars of the 1960s to the shaved-head look of the popular female Irish singer Sinead O’Connor (1966).

The visual assault of gender-bending is meant to make the viewer question his or her own sexual preconceptions while expanding social acceptance for alternative ways of interhuman relating. In the best sense, these artists transform themselves into living artistic statements, to shock, to amuse, or to befuddle the general public. In the worst sense, as in the case of commercial celebrities like Madonna (1958; b. M. Ciccone), outre sex is used as the ultimate tool to sell a bill of goods.

—Richard Carlin

In contrast to my sometime loyal publisher, usually a smart guy, I think gender one of many current (recent?) categories that really don’t belong in this book, because its terms relate to journalism, which by definition lasts only a day, rather than to books, which are meant to last for years. Only the innocent and very young find revelation in the notion that femininity and masculinity are not biological truths but cultural constructs visible to different degrees in different people. My own opinion is that understandings based on gender have become (became?) the great heresy of a recent generation, just as intelligence based on psychotropic drugs was the great heresy of my contemporaries and alcoholic unintelligence sabotaged the best minds of a previous generation, all of which provide the illusion of insight only to those who indulge.

While preparing this third edition, I discovered the initially attractive notion of “gender surfing” whose definition I reprint sooner than appropriate: “The confusing game with sexual roles whose point is to mix them up, to humorous effect.” One problem is that such fantastic comedy in art can be easily missed, as often by those predisposed as by those opposed.

Gershwin, George

(26 September 1898–11 July 1937)

His greatest innovation was inventing a distinctly American opera in Porgy and Bess (1934). Not only is it set in America, but more distinctly in African-America, but it also favors American musical departures and American musicians. The test for the latter is syncopation, which comes from hitting a note slightly before or after what’s annotated. Europeans can’t do it without years of discovery and then practice. For instance, the song “It Ain’t Necessarily So” is best sung with an off-beat pause before the second word.

Critically deprecated on its premiere, Porgy survived, notwithstanding a depressing (so “Russian”?) plot, in part because it contains such classic songs as “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “My Man’s Done Gone,” and the immortal “Summertime.”

Gershwin’s other masterpiece is the distinctly American symphony, Rhapsody in Blue (1924) that opens with a short clarinet solo. I once heard this performed by a prominent European orchestra whose lead clarinetist missed the syncopation possible in that opening phrase. For me that performance ran downhill from there.

Conducting around 2015 an email symposium among colleagues asked to identify the five Greatest American Operas, I found that nearly all of us put Porgy near the on the top of our lists, which measures that just as nothing before was in the same league, so little since has been.

Gerz, Jochen

(4 April 1940)

Though Gerz has been a colleague of mine for nearly a half-century, I barely understand his work and career, perhaps because we live in different cities, mostly because we have pursued drastically different directions from similar beginnings. Born in BERLIN and raised in Dusseldorf, Gerz began as a VISUAL POET whose first exhibition (1968) was held in conjunction with JEAN -F RANCOIS B ORY; and, like Bory, Gerz made some striking BOOK-ART. From here he moved into one-person performances, presented nearly entirely in Europe, which depend upon a striking narrative. A recurring motif involves burying something in the earth, so that only a memory of the piece survives. Gerz has made photographs and videotapes, both distinguished more for their conceptual/documentary resonance than for their mediumistic artistry.

Gesamtkunstwerk

See WAGNER, Richard.

Gestures, Significant

(20th century)

As a prophet of what later became known as Conceptual Art, MARCEL DUCHAMP offered a store-bought urinal to a contemporary art exhibition. This exemplified a gesture that gained significance from its appearance in a populous art exhibition, rather than in a hardware store. So did Duchamp’s refusal afterwards to make art; likewise later prominent artists’ refusal(s) differ, say, from an art student’s.

Another significant gesture was JOHN CAGE’s positioning silence in a concert where music was expected. So established is the custom of identifying value wholly by an artist’s personal history and/or ART WORLD situations that, especially in the 21st century, comparable purported anti-art artists’ moves often seem, especially if insufficiently based in some flimsy context, to be exploiting trivially some “artistic” privilege. Significant gestures are, needless to say perhaps, different from dancers’ or painters’ physical movements and also from artists’ personal gifts.

Gianakos, Cristos

(4 January 1934)

Influenced on one hand by the broad lines of the American painter FRANZ K LINE and, on another side, by the sculptures of VLADIMIR T ATLIN, Gianakos has produced unadorned ramps that cut across spaces both indoors and out with a sure elegance. They typically reveal their scaffolding, whose crosshatched braces have visual charm. The Maroussi Ramp (1995), over 100 feet long and made from painted steel, is perhaps the most spectacular, permanently crossing a ravine in the Emfietzoglou Art Center in Athens. Another interesting, original move in his work involves imposing geometric shapes on photographs or drawings of classic Greek architecture and sculpture. As an American of Greek descent, Gianakos has done more major work in his parents’ native country than in his own. His brother Steve G. (1938) is also an artist, working mostly in two dimensions in entirely different ways.

Giedions

(Carola G.-Welcker, 1893–1979; Sigfried, 1888–1968)

While many very young critical historians love and marry with the hope of abetting each other’s careers, few couples produced the achievements of the Giedions. Becoming the more prominent, Siegfried produced Space, Time, and Architecture (1941), which became for decades the seminal book for understanding modernist architecture. His other sweeping masterpiece, Mechanization Takes Command (1948), portrays technological development as “Anonymous History.”

She wrote a biography of PAUL KLEE (1961) and Modern Sculpture (1977), among other books of art history, in addition to editing two taste-making anthologies –Poètes à l’Écart/ anthologie der abseitigen (1946, Offside Poetry) and Fonts 1926–1971 (1973). In the late 1920s their Zurich home welcomed many artists and writers residing there including HANS ARP and JAMES JOYCE. Without the Giedions’ efforts, together and later apart, modernist understanding would have been less.

Gilbert and George

(G. Proesch, 17 September 1943; and G. Passmore, 8 January 1942)

Meeting as sculpture students at the St. Martin’s School of Art in 1967, these two men, billed only with their first names, have worked together ever since. Their initial innovation was to exhibit themselves as “living sculptures,” cleanly dressed in identical gray suits, their faces and hands usually painted silver, one bespectacled and the other not. In vaudeville-like, scheduled performances that had announced beginnings, they would typically sing “Underneath the Arches,” a British music hall passé tune, again and again. Or they would pose on a museum’s stairway for several hours straight, earning newspaper articles with titles like “Living Sculptures” or “They Keep Stiff for Hours.” They issued resonant statements: “Being living Sculpture is our life blood.” They’ve insisted upon being regarded as not a duet or a partnership but a single artist.

In the early 1970s, Gilbert and George were ubiquitous, illustrating how rapidly and internationally a truly original idea can find acceptance in visual-arts venues. In 1970 alone, they had over a dozen solo exhibitions in venues as various as museums in Dusseldorf, Krefeld, Oxford, Copenhagen, Stuttgart, Turin, and Oslo, and private galleries in Milan, London, BERLIN, Cologne, and Amsterdam. Not unlike celebrities in other cultural domains, they exploited their fame to produce book-art, videotapes, drawings, and, especially large photographs arrayed in photogrids, most of which portrayed them in various posed circumstances, some of which portray naked young males including themseves. Hellish (1980), among the strongest (appearing on the cover of a 1980 exhibition catalog) has one man in profile, colored yellow, sticking his tongue out toward the other, in contrary profile, his face evenly red, with his mouth open only inches away, as though he would soon receive his colleague’s tongue. The work measures 240 centimeters by 300 centimeters (or roughly 8 feet by 11 feet), in twenty-four separate panels. Gil-bert and George’s “book as a sculpture,” Dark Shadow (1974), portrays in photographs and texts a decadent world that seems to lie behind their self-consciously neat appearance.

Catalogs about Gilbert and George resemble hagiography in glorifying what would normally seem trivial, in part because nearly all featured pictures of themselves. (As photographers, they were curiously far less successful than ROBERT M APPLETHORPE at making nude bodies appear sculptural in a two-dimensional medium.) Though neither was born in English, they have become British artists, even if untypical in producing a decidedly urban art that ignores the countrysides. Their names together echo a British twosome renowned a century before for their charming operettas.

Gillespie, Abraham Lincoln

(11 June 1895–10 September 1950)

Commonly regarded as the most eccentric of the literary Americans gathered in Paris in the 1920s, Gillespie produced prose so unique it must be read to be believed; excerpts are not sufficient. He made VISUAL POETRY; he worked with neologisms in a piece/poem characteristically titled “A Purplexicon of Dissynthegrations (Tdevelop abut Earfluxsatisvie-thru-Heypersieving),” which typically tells almost everything that need be known about Gillespie in an introductory entry. It is indicative that no book of his writings appeared until thirty years after his death. Few literary histories even mention him.

Gins, Madeline

(7 November 1941–8 January 2014)

It is hard to explain how Gins’s first novel Word Rain found a commercial publisher in 1969, because its theme is the epistemological opacity of language itself. The first sign of the book’s unusual concerns is its subtitle: “(or a Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigations to G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,0, It Says)”; a second is the incorporation of several signs of new fiction: special languages, expressive design, extrinsically imposed form –most of these devices reiterating, in one way or another, the book’s theme. What distinguishes Word Rain are numerous inventive displays of printed material: lists of unrelated words with dots between them, entire pages filled mostly with dashes, where words might otherwise be, pseudo-logical proofs, passages in which the more mundane expressions are crossed out, an appendix of “some of the words (temporary definitions) not included,” even a photographed hand holding both sides of a printed page, and a concluding page of dense print-over-print that reads at its bottom: “This page contains every word in the book.”

I’ve found Gins’s later books comparably obscure, though perhaps less ambitious, even when her subject is presidential politics; but because no one else risks writing about her work, let alone reading it critically, there is no one other than yourself, my dear reader, with whom you can compare my impression. It may or may not be important that she was married for over three decades to the painter (Shusaku) A RAKAWA, with whom Gins has collaborated on an extremely opaque, large format visual/verbal book that has gone through three significantly different editions, The Mechanism of Meaning (1971, 1979, 1988), much like this Dictionary.

Ginsberg, Allen

(3 June 1926–5 April 1997)

The avant-garde Ginsberg is the author not of post-Whitmanian lines that survive in the head of every literate American but of certain sound poems that he published without musical notation. (He also published, as well as sang, many conventionally configured songs.) One of them, “Fie My Fum,” appears in his Collected Poems (1984), while most do not. An example is “Put Down Yr Cigarette Rag,” whose verses conclude with variations on the refrain “dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke”: “Nine billion bucks for dope/ approved by Time & Life/ America’s lost hope/ The President smokes his wife/ Dont Smoke dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke nope/ nope nope nope.” Especially when I heard Ginsberg perform this, I wished he produced more poems like it.

Glarner, Fritz

(20 July 1899–18 September 1972)

Escaping from Europe in 1936, he came to New York, where he was able to greet PIET MONDRIAN, later exiled there. In the succinct summary of KATHERINE S. DREIER:

It was fortunate for the art world that MONDRIAN came to New York, and that during the few years that Mondrian lived here he was able to introduce the philosophy underlying his work to both [Burgoyne] DILLER and Glarner. There were others who were fascinated by Mondrian’s approach to art, but they never seemed to have absorbed his philosophy, and without the philosophy there is no continuity of thought and work. However, Diller and Glarner have absorbed Mondrian’s philosophy without becoming imitators but have instead returned their own individuality.

One difference was that whereas Mondrian insisted upon the integrity of a rectangle, Glarner painted on other geometric shapes, insisting upon “the slant and oblique.” With many rectangles various in shape, his paintings reflected his master’s late American work more than the classic European Mondrian. Concrete Art, rather than the more familiar NEOPLASTICISIM, was Glarner’s own favorite epithet for his work. Perhaps because he was born and died in Switzerland, his posthumous reputation has been stronger there than in America (and a superficial bio note for him might suggest that nothing happened in between).

Glass, Philip

(31 January 1937)

Traditionally trained, not only at the Juilliard conserva-tory but with the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) in Paris, Glass began as a conventional composer before creating music of distinction: a sequence of pieces that included Strung Out (1967), Music in Similar Motion (1969), Music in Contrary Motion (1969), and Music in Fifths (1969). Essentially monophonic, these compositions have lines of individual notes, with neither harmonies nor counterpoint; they are tonal without offering melodies, accessible without being seductive. What made this music seem radical in the 1960s was its avoidance of all the principal issues that preoccupied nearly all contemporary composers at that time –issues such as chance and control, serialism, and atonality, improvisation and spontaneity. It is scarcely surprising that before his music was performed in concert halls it was heard in art galleries and in art museums. Though this music was frequently characterized as M INIMAL, the epithet MODULAR is more appropriate for Glass (as well as STEVE REICH and TERRY RILEY, among others) in that severely circumscribed bits of musical material are repeated in various ways. One minor innovation is that even in live concerts Glass’s music would usually be heard through amplifiers, the man at the electronic mixing board (Kurt Munkasci) becoming one of the acknowledged “musicians.”

Within Music with Changing Parts (1970), Glass moved progressively from monophony, in its opening moments, to a greater polyphonic complexity and then, toward its end, into the kinds of modulations that would inform his next major work, Music in Twelve Parts (1974), an exhaustive four-hour piece that epitomizes Glass’s compositional ideas at that time and remains, in my opinion, the zenith of his avant-garde art. Glass subsequently moved into operatic collaborations, beginning with Einstein on the Beach (1976, with ROBERT W ILSON) and then SATYAGRAHA (1980, based upon Mahatma Gandhi’s early years), among other operas.

The requirements of music theater, as he prefers to call it, made his music more accessible and his name more familiar, as it did for AARON C OPLAND before him. Glass’s composing in the 1980s became more lyrical and more charming, which is to say devoid of those earlier challenging characteristics that might make it problematic to his new, larger audience.

Glaugnea

(c. 1971)

An artificial language that is both hermetic and all-encompassing, Glaugnea is an invention of the poet Michael Helsem (1958). The language grew out of Helsem’s teenage experimentation with language invention. Starting with the concept that everything had one true name (the concept that drove some of the earliest inventors of artificial languages), Helsem eventually transformed his language into one where every word in any language, any character in any script, any sound in any tongue was part of Glaugnea. This bizarre fact might make it appear that Glaugnea is not a language at all, but merely a concept. However, the tongue comes complete with pronunciations, grammatical rules, with, in short, the structure that makes language a possible means of communication. Glaugnea has a complete set of pronouns –and all persons and genders of those pronouns exist in singular, plural, and (the rare) dual forms. Glaugnea has an intricate set of “answer-words” (yes, no, maybe, and combinations of these), a detailed set of suffixes denoting negation (including “no longer,” and “opposite of” as well as “not”), and an almost runic alphabet, the members of which look suspiciously like Chris-tograms. An interesting feature of the tongue is that Helsem designed it with the dictionary in mind, for his precise and often poetic definitions are part of the gestalt of the language. Take these examples from his Giyorbicon (which roughly translates as “A Dictionary of Hitherto-Unarticulated Nuance”): oolongphaeic: dusky as the taste of oolong tea; peguc: the joy of precision; hooth: a chance happening which becomes meaningful in retrospect.

—Geof Huth

Gober, Robert

(12 September 1954)

The installations of Gober are the most consistently recognizable examples of the theme of abjection: the conception and rendition of the human body as the site of poisons and morbid excretions, making the body emblematic of death and marking the physical person as repulsive to society and an outcast. Gober evokes the theme by creating stiff and partial figures that he punctures with holes and frequently metal sink drains and then lays on the floor in hallucinatory environments. In an untitled 1991 installation at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, he embedded a male figure into the wall so that it was visible only from the waist down. The wall was painted with a lush forest scene, and candles were placed into holes in the trousers. Gober’s damaged figures –open to the poisons of the environment and sometimes, as in the Jeu de Paume exhibition, portrayed in a self-memorializing state –are clearly images of a deeply emotional response to the AIDS crisis. Even so, from the point of view of formal innovation and expressive articulation of the human form, his figures add nothing to the artistic language of human gesture. Gober does not render the figure; he cites it as a point of reference.

—Mark Daniel Cohen

Godard, Jean-Luc

(3 December 1930)

While working toward a Certificate in Ethnology at the Sorbonne, Jean-Luc Godard regularly attended meetings and screenings at the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin. By all accounts, the young Godard was obsessed by movies, developing a taste for American films that struggled against the Hollywood system (the cigar-munching Samuel Fuller appears in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou [1965] as himself and defines “movies”). Godard also developed an immediate dislike and, more importantly, distrust of overt commercial cinema, particularly of French origins.

Godard’s contribution to the New Wave was always the most experimental, most confrontational, and most political of those of the directors connected to him. His New Wave films attacked the very grammar of traditional cinema. His first film was a shock to the system of movies: À Bout de Souffle (Breathless) (1960) is a “gangster” film that reshapes the language of the commercial film through technical experimentation –jump cuts, a shaky camera, a wild pace –at the same time that it questions the form.

All of Godard’s films of the 1960s work in this manner because a Godard film is always an essay on film. Between the years 1960–67, Godard produced a staggering fifteen films, including some of the classics of the New Wave: Vivre sa Vie (1962), Les Carabiniers (1963), Une Femme Mariée (1964), and Alphaville (1965). His films were also political critiques, exemplified by the examination of the war in Le Petit Soldat (1960), which was banned by the French government until 1963, and La Chinoise (1967). Weekend (1967) ended the first phase of Godard’s career at the same time that it depicted the end of Western civilization. Denouncing cinema as “bourgeois,” Godard made the art “disappear” as he turned to a new form: “revolutionary films for revolutionary people.”

From 1968 to 1973 Godard made films as a part of the Marxist filmmaking collective known as the Dziga-Vertov group. If Bertolt Brecht had been an influence on Godard’s “alienation” of traditional cinema, then it was Brecht’s political example that pushed Godard into making films such as One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil) (1968) and See You at Mao (1969). The former work featured factory noise so excruciating that it is difficult to listen to. One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil) was famous for featuring the Rolling Stones working on a record album; it was also an infamous film for the fight Godard waged with the film’s producer over the final cut. Godard’s cut had the Stones working on a set of songs without any conclusion to their efforts –the revolution is not complete.

The early 1970s marked Godard’s break with the Marxist group, although he still kept his confrontational politics. He began experiments with mixing film and video in works entitled Numeró deux (1975), which he said was a “remake” of Breathless, and Comment ça va? (1975). This mixture of film and video led to his first feature film in almost eight years: Sauve qui peut (1980). The main character of this return to film is a Godard alter ego who teaches a class on cinema. Critical awareness of the evolution of film Godard brought to the films that follow, most notably the controversial retelling of the immaculate conception in Je vous salue, Marie (Hail Mary) (1984), and the story of a God in a man’s body that is Hélas pour moi (1993).

Godard’s next project was a video work begun in 1989 called Histoire(s) du cinéma. A history of film, Godard’s ongoing video, whose latest segments were completed in 1997, combines images from painting, film, and sculpture to form a collage of ideas and impressions. It is an unfinished essay on watching film by someone who destroyed movies before breathing avant-garde life back into them.

—John Rocco

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

(28 August 1749–22 March 1832)

Aside from appreciating the quality of his various works, he should be remembered as the first writer to amplify the frame of what a writer could do. Remembered as the author of classic plays in both verse and prose, he wrote a first novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774, 1787, The Sorrows of Young Werther), that established his fame. Afterwards came other fiction, poetry, literary criticism, polemics on esthetics, jurisprudence, texts about botany and anatomy, a treatise on color, memoirs, and a classic autobiography. In addition, he left behind a wealth of resonant unfinished texts worth study and nearly 3,000 drawings. Simply, he exploited fame not to redo his earlier success, as a commercial hack might, but as a springboard for his expansive cultural imagination. Less a polymath (like LEONARDO DA VINCI) than a writer whose career exemplified what we later call POLYARTISTRY, Goethe would stand as a model. One curiosity is that, notwithstanding his sophistication and success, he chose to reside not in a major cultural center but in a small city, Weimar, where for decades he stood as king (“von”) of a low hill.

Goff, Bruce

(8 June 1904–4 August 1982)

Influenced by FRANK L LOYD W RIGHT, Goff built numerous houses in the Middle and far West that blend structure into the environment. His masterpiece, the Bavinger House (1955) in Norman, Oklahoma, has a 96-foot wall that follows a logarithmic spiral into the living space and ultimately around a steel pole, from which the entire roof, interior stairway, and living areas are suspended. Plants inside the structure duplicate those outside, so that the environment seemingly flows into the home, or vice versa. “They wanted a large open space, and liked the idea of living on different levels,” Goff told an interviewer. “They wanted many interior plants, and preferred natural rather than synthetic materials.” In his Bizarre Architecture (1979), the critical historian Charles Jencks (1939) locates Goff in a “Pantheon,” particularly praising the Joe Price House (1956) in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where windows are hidden behind a facade of “triangular and hexagonal shapes [that] explode into copper roofs, a sun-screen of white stars, green-blue crystal and strange yellow spikes.”

Goffman, Erving

(11 June 1922–19 November 1982)

In his first book, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1959), the most original academic sociologist of his times suggested that social life is a kind of theater and thus that human beings are always performing for audiences, playing different roles, or projecting different selves, in various situations. Pursuing his theme to disturbing implications, he even suggested that even alone a person imagines performance in his own head and that self-conscious sincerity is “merely being taken in by one’s own art.”

Doing his field work in exotic situations, including a hotel in the Shetland Islands and a gambling casino, Goffman generated a wealth of original and largely persuasive sociological insights into the minutiae of interactions. He also wrote sensitively about stigma-tized people because he was short in stature. From the Italian writer UMBERTO ECO (1932–2016): “The genius and penetration with which he could identify infinitely small aspects of behaviour that had previously eluded everyone else.”

Some of his ideas were relevant to art, particularly to PERFORMANCE art, particularly to ALLAN KAPROW, who wrote this appreciation of Goffman:

In this book and subsequent ones, he describes greetings, relations between office workers and bosses, front-of-the-store and back-of-the store behavior, civilities and discourtesies in private and public, the maintenance of small social units on streets and in crowded gatherings, and so forth as if each situation had a prescribed scenario. Human beings participate in these scenarios, spontaneously or after elaborate preparations, like actors without stage or audience, watching and cuing one another.

If all life were theater, then mundane activities could be considered theatrical. “Intentionally performing everyday life is bound to create curious kinds of awareness.” This last thought became the foundation of Kaprow’s own explorations after 1970.

Golberg, Mécislas

(21 October 1869–28 December 1907; b. Mieczyslaw Goldberg)

Born in Poland, he came to Paris in 1891 and soon afterwards wrote in French for both art magazines and anarchist journals, becoming much like his contemporary FÉLIX FÉNÉON, one of the few advocates of avant-garde art who was also politically anarchist. In the second respect, he advocated a libertarian Zionism as early as 1899.

The culmination of his art criticism was a book La morale des lignes (1907, The Morality of Lines), which is customarily honored as an early examination of the relationship between art and art geometry as well as pre-CUBIST esthetics. Among these classic summaries:

Precise definition of the planes by the minimum effort of line; a tendency toward polygons and towards curves closer to the ellipse than to the circle; suggestion by means of points or strokes; and, lastly, distribution of light by reference to the inclination of the planes and not in accordance with their convexity or concavity; this is modern design, the product of the modern soul.

—trans. Jonathan Griffin

Though Golberg died early of tuberculosis, his last book, not forgotten, was reprinted intact (in French) a full century later by a publisher in India, exemplifying the rule, not to be forgotten: as long as someone somewhere is keeping earlier writing or art alive, it has survived. Credit the superior American art historian/ curator Edward Fry (1936–92) with remembering this Golberg in his Cubism (1966).

Goldberg, Rube

(4 July 1883–7 December 1970; b. Reuben Lucius G.)

Do not dismiss Goldberg as a mere cartoonist, because his stylistically unique pictures tell within single frames complicated stories leading his readers mostly with words through narrative steps that are filled with unobvious moves sometimes defying reality. His theme becomes the ironic relation between effort and result. By making a simple move needlessly complex they satirize a certain modern predisposition.

By no measure are they “cartoons” whose point can be understood instantly, which is to say that, for all their resemblance to popular art, they approach more serious work by requiring of their readers time merely to go back and forth between the verbal and the visual. As visual literature, they tell within a single frame stories with a protagonist who must overcome obstacles. It is not for nothing that his influence can be observed in the kinetic sculpture of GEORGE RHOADS and the poetic art of DAVID M ORICE, among others.

Remember that, much like ALEXANDER CALDER and certain other idiosyncratic artists, Goldberg earned a degree in engineering, from the University of California at Berkeley no less. And that he published for sixty-five years and, finally, might be the only individual featured in this book ever to earn a Pulitzer Prize.

Goldsworthy, Andy

(26 July 1956)

Like DAVID N ASH, Goldsworthy has helped to reorient recent British sculpture to natural materials and forms. What distinguishes Goldsworthy’s works in the late 1980s and 1990s is his expansion of the range of craft and his mixing of natural materials and natural forms that do not belong together. Working with elements of nature such as twigs, stones, leaves, even snow, Goldsworthy makes intimate observations of natural processes, which he then duplicates as he fashions objects that his chosen materials never generated on their own, such as a bee’s nest woven together from leaves. Goldsworthy works in the wild rather than the studio, creating his works while wandering about, in a manner similar to that of RICHARD L ONG. However, he has a heavier touch than Long, and a tendency to impose artificial appearances on the terrain, covering stones with autumn leaves of garish colors, or cutting concentric circles into slabs of frozen snow. Such practices seem an imposition on –rather than a response to –the land, and a direct contradiction of the initial impulses of Earth Art. In the end, Goldsworthy can be credited with expanding the range of techniques available to sculptors and with giving new emphasis to working by hand.

—Mark Daniel Cohen

Goll, Iwan

(29 March 1891–27 February 1950; b. Herbert [or Isaac] Lang)

An Alasatian who spoke French at home and German at school, he wrote poetry and dramas as well as criticism in both languages. As an early EXPRESSIONIST he published a volume of poems in 1912, The Panama Canal, which celebrated the linking of two oceans through the collaboration of workers of all races and classes.

• Iron sluices grow with every push and pull
• Every inch nailed in with the tiniest of hammers
• Huge wings carried by small steel structures
• As if by Prometheus into the deep
• And when these soon finally do open
• when two enemy oceans embrace
• O, then will weep
• All the nations on earth.

Later in his life, Goll rewrote his most famous poem, reflecting his discovery that workers in Panama’s excessive humidity were scarcely ecstatic.

A typical example of his expressionist prose appeared in 1921, the stylistic abruptness, epitomized by bursts of language, becoming a representation of unselfconscious communication:

Demand. Manifesto. Appeal. Accusation. Oath, Ecstasy. Struggle. Man screams. We are. One another. Passion.

After abandoning EXPRESSIONISM, he and his wife Clair Studer (b. 1891 as Claire Aischmann) moved to Paris before, as he was Jewish, they fled to America in 1939. While residing in Brooklyn, Goll edited from 1943 to 1946 the magazine Hemispheres that published both French and American poets, incidentally becoming perhaps the first major New York literary magazine published outside Manhattan.

Perhaps because Goll published in several countries, in different forms and different languages, his work has never received the recognition it deserves. Among his additional literary pseudonyms were Iwan Lassang, Tristan Torsi, and Tristan Thor. His widow published in 1962 The Lost Paradise, a memoir of an angry childhood.

Gombrich, E. H.

(30 March 1909–3 November 2001; b. Ernst Hans Josef G.)

Born in Vienna, he immigrated to England in the 1930s and learned to write in English several major books that placed him among the towering figures in 20th-century art history. One theme important to him was establishing that new art comes mostly out of previous art and thus that it gains value from contributing to previous acknowledged achievements, also thus implicitly minimizing claims to superior personal experience. Though he was in his own tastes no fan of any avant-garde, this principle becomes useful in recognizing the value of various developments, including CONCEPTUAL ART.

Attending Gombrich’s graduate seminar at the Warburg Institute, London, in the spring of 1965, I was initially puzzled by what appeared to be contrary strong opinions, praising as he did the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and Karl Popper (1902–94), along with SIGMUND FREUD! I had to be told that the key to his loyalties was Gombrich’s native city in the 1920s, when all three of his masters resided there. Thus, by contrast, people or ideas that he could identify as contributing to Vienna’s later decline were deprecated. Amazed I was that an intellectual with such profound ideas could favor such a simplistic principle in his specific judgments. Nevertheless, he died Sir Ernest.

Gómez De La Serna, Ramón

(3 July 1888–12 January 1963)

A Spanish writer whose specialty was a fictional aphorism (as distinct from a philosophical one) that he called greguería, Gómez de la Serna was the most original author of his generation in Spain (whose writer contemporaries included José Ortega y Gasset [1883–1955] and Miguel de Unamuno [1864–1936]). Though he published essays, short stories, plays, novels, biographies, memoirs, and even chronicles of the gatherings at his favorite literary café in Madrid –in sum, more than eighty books before turning 40 –Gómez de la Serna is best remembered for his thousands of greguerías, which he claimed to have invented around 1910: “The little girl wants to dance because she wants to fly”; “Moon and sand are mad for each other”; “Tigers of somnambulists and they cross rivers of sleep over bridges of leaps”; “We should take more time to forget; thus we would have a longer life.” (No one would ever confuse these with philosophical aphorisms.) His radio plays were also pioneering.

As an arts critic Gómez de la Serna wrote a monograph on Salvador Dali and another on Movieland (1930) before ever visiting America. Through his intelligence about film, he preceded NATHANAEL WEST in appreciating its outrageously eclectic scenery:

From the distance Movieland looks like Constantinople combined with a little Tokyo, a touch of Florence and a hint of New York …. It is like a Noah’s Ark of architecture, a Florentine palace seized with a salaciousness which exotic buildings produce, looks longingly at a Grand Pagoda.

Even in translation, that’s classic.

I wish I knew enough Spanish to read an autobiography marvelously titled Automoribundia (1948), which is often identified as “one of the most interesting, original and renewing works of Spanish autobiography of the 20th century.”

Professor Miguel González-Gerth (1926–2017) notes, “He opposed esthetic hierarchies, advocating instead that the artist should have complete freedom and start with everything at zero level.”

Though Gómez thought of greguería as a combination of “metaphor + humor,” Spanish-English dictionaries translate his key word as “irritating noise, gibberish, or hubbub,” which is less nonsense than a kind of inspired ridiculousness. Much as Apollinaire was known to his friends mostly as Kostro, GdlS was more commonly “Ramón.” Not unlike other Spanish writers of his generation, he left his native country during the 1930s Civil War for Buenos Aires, where he died decades later.

Gomringer, Eugen

(20 January 1925)

A Swiss-German born in Bolivia, Gomringer pioneered the idea of CONCRETE P OETRY, publishing early examples and writing the most visible early manifesto. His key idea was the “constellation,” or words in standard typography connected by qualities apart from syntax, freely distributed within the space of the printed page. Given his polyglot background, Gomringer was able to write his poems in Spanish, French, English, and German. For instance, down a single page are widely spaced three words: “berg land see,” or “mountain,” “land” (i.e., territory, ground), “sea,” preceding by several years comparable MINIMAL poems. The English texts reprinted in Gomringer’s 1969 retrospective include “butterfly,” nine lines divided into three stanzas, which would be striking in any American poetry magazine even today:

• mist
• mountain
• butterfly
• mountain
• butterfly
• missed
• butterfly
• meets
• mountain.

Perhaps because the initial American anthologies of Concrete Poetry were not as good as they should have been, Gomringer failed to have as much presence as he deserved in the English-speaking world.

González, Julio

(21 September 1876–27 March 1942)

Born into a family of Barcelona metal artisans, González learned techniques that, after a decade of painting, he put to esthetic use in sculpture, beginning with masks. He first forged sculpture in iron in 1927, and, the following year, though already in his early fifties, he decided to devote himself exclusively to sculpture whose innovations depend upon the use of welding. Gonzalez was a close friend of his countryman PABLO P ICASSO, to whom he introduced the possibility of metal sculpture, and González’s works initially reflected the influence of C UBISM. Later assimilating the radical example of ALEXANDER C ALDER, the Spaniard made open works defined less by solidity than by an assembling of rods and ribbons of metal. All subsequent welded sculpture, including DAVID S MITH’s, implicitly acknowledges González’s pioneering influence.

Gorey, Edward

(22 February 1925–15 April 2000)

Gorey became the master of visual fiction, which is to say images, generally composed of pictures mixed with words, whose sequences suggest narrative. Superficially similar to comic books in their use of successive panels, Gorey’s stories are generally more profound in theme and more serious in subject, with an adult use of language and more detailed pictures. In an extreme Gorey work, like “The West Wing,” the images appear without words; for “The Wuggly Ump,” he added color. Gorey also produced literary ballets or scenarios for dance. His works look superficially similar as well to the work of FRANS M ASEREEL, who likewise produced successive panels suggesting narrative; but Gorey is a far superior craftsman with a superior narrative imagination. Though Gorey’s SIGNATURE is well known, thanks to his distinctive book covers and their publication in prominent magazines, his visual narratives are not acknowledged in histories or encyclopedias of American fiction. Curiously, Gorey is probably the most prominent visual artist ever to graduate from Harvard College, his work reflecting in its literacy an Ivy League education.

Gorgeous George

(24 March 1915–26 December 1963; b. George Raymond Wagner)

Within the theatrical universe of “professional wrestling,” he was the innovative figure who starred not with his martial skills but through his extravagant appearance that broke established proscriptions. Less than 6 feet tall, weighing slightly over 200 pounds, George Wagner dominated the roped stage by dying his hair platinum blonde and letting it grow long enough to need gold bobby pins. Audaciously renaming himself, he appeared with a sequined robe, smelling of perfume, and appearing effeminate (though long-married). His elaborate entrance included a factotum who laid down a red carpet and carried a silver mirror while spreading rose petals at George’s feet.

Especially in the 1950s, he became a television star whom fans loved to love or to hate, also drawing an appreciative audience that paid money simply to see him live. Able to negotiate for 50 percent of the ticket receipts, George became for a while the highest paid “athlete” in the world. His extravagant theatrical style influenced not only sportsmen such as MUHAMMED ALI, who actually met George when he was still Cassius Clay, and later exhibition wrestlers (athletic clowns) but pop singers such as Elvis Presley (1935–77) and James Brown (1933–2006). The latter once told his biographer that he donned costumes even to venture outside his house because he needed to appear like someone whom “people paid to see.”

Gormley, Antony

(3 August 1950)

The British artist Gormley and ROBERT G OBER have been the two principal young sculptors to focus on figurative work through the 1980s and 1990s, a period in which sculptors have largely moved away from representation of the human form and experimented with found materials arranged in large installations. Whereas Gober builds tableaux that frequently, but not always, include the figure, Gormley works almost exclusively with the human form. By casting in lead, he creates life-sized figures that are usually stiffly upright, almost mummified, and softly defined. The gray, char-acterless images wear a grid work of highly visible horizontal and vertical white seams where the parts have been assembled, and Gormley distributes them in odd positions around the exhibition space. They lie flat on their backs, float horizontally with feet against the wall, hang with their heads embedded in the ceiling. On occasion, they roll up in a ball, lie spreadeagled with arms and legs thrown out, or sit on their haunches. And sometimes Gormley turns to other images: airplanes, fish, enormous spheres. But these works stand apart from his principal thrust. Gormley has observed that he is interested in “materializing perhaps for the first time, the space within the body…. To realize embodiment, without really worrying too much about mimesis, about representation in a traditional way.” His purpose is to instigate a sense of the body’s inner cavity as the focus of a meditative state. The evident seams on his figures give them the appearance of being hollow, vessels containing something within. Their lack of animation makes them seem less like living beings and more like shells of life, and their frequent hovering suggests an otherworldliness.

—Mark Daniel Cohen

Gould, Glenn

(25 September 1932–4 October 1982)

While Gould’s piano performances represented a stunning departure from standard classical interpretation, especially in his recordings of J. S. BACH, they gained immediate acceptability that was not bestowed upon his creative works, which were audiotape compositions of speech and sound done mostly for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The first three portray isolation in Canada: The Idea of North (1967) focuses on individuals who live near the Arctic Circle; The Latecomers (1969) depicts Newfoundland; and Quiet in the Land (1973) portrays religious fundamentalists. A second trilogy deals with the musicians ARNOLD S CHOENBERG, LEOPOLD S TOKOWSKI, and Richard Strauss (1864–1949), again incorporating interviews into an audio montage that gives the illusion of a live symposium with ingeniously appropriate musical backgrounds. Gould also collaborated with the French musician Bruno Monsaingeon (1943) in producing what remains, in my judgment, the most exquisite and unaffected film/video ever of musical performance, The Goldberg Variations (1981).

Otherwise, Gould was a brilliant and witty writer, especially about the revolution implicit in recordings. In his highly imaginative reinterpretations of certain classical piano music, Gould successfully made familiar repertoire unfamiliar until, thanks to recordings, his performances gained increasing acceptance. Measuring his greatness, these recordings are treasured decades after they were initially issued. His closest competitor as a profoundly radical pianist, often favoring a different repertoire, was the Russian Sviatoslav Richter (1915–97), who incidentally honored Gould, who extended to Richter great respect in return.

Gould, Joe

(12 September 1889–18 August 1957; b. Joseph Ferdinand G.)

As an undergraduate at Harvard around the same time as T. S. ELIOT, among other budding literati, Gould developed a literary reputation before moving to New York, more precisely to Greenwich Village, where he became a familiar figure, often homeless, sometimes begging, his Ivy League degree giving him credibility among those predisposed. Joe Gould claimed to be writing an “Oral History of the Contemporary World,” parts of which appeared in such literary magazines as The Dial and Broom. He reviewed books for The New Republic, among other periodicals. A 1942 profile in The New Yorker gave Gould and his purported project a certain celebrity, especially by quoting literary colleagues who claimed to have seen large manuscripts.

Nonetheless, when Gould died, after some holidays in mental hospitals, nothing was found, raising the question of what ever existed. What initially seemed a harmless hoax with an ambitious title can now, thanks to the influence of CONCEPTUAL ART, be ranked as a masterpiece in absentia, which is to say an inspiring framing vision of a great book that ought to exist, even if it didn’t, or doesn’t (yet). Consider that decades later someone else could write this “Oral History,” even publishing it under Joe Gould’s name. As such, his myth stands for me in the same class as the D. Fict (or fictitious doctorate) from Oxford University that the highly imaginative American artist James Lee Byars (1932–97) awarded himself. Just imagining such possibilities offers its own reward(s).

Graham, Dan

(31 March 1942; b. Daniel Henry G.)

Though I have known him most of my adult life and followed his activities as often as I could, my sense of his achievement remains incomplete. As a critical writer, Graham published some of the most insightful essays about’60s avant-garde sculpture; as the director in the mid-’60s of a New York gallery bearing his name in part (John Daniels), he exhibited work so advanced that memory of it survives decades later. (In visual art, especially in America, more especially in New York, don’t forget, most galleries’ visibility is very temporary.)

As a creator of original language structures, Graham published highly unprecedented conceptual poems that were anthologized in my Possibilities of Poetry (1970). The art historian Thomas Crow (1948), in his book on the 1960s, credits Graham with exhibiting his art in a magazine’s pages “as conveniently as an art gallery,” which is a curious distinction. His best performances are remembered long after their premieres. According to the historian RoseLee Goldberg (1947):

Dan Graham explored Bertolt Brecht’s principles of alienation, connecting performer and viewer by designing situations that had discomfort built into the work. In Performance, Audience, Mirror (1977), the audience, seated on chairs in front of a large mirror, were forced to become witness to their own movements and to read each other’s self-conscious body language. To increase their unease, Graham walked back and forth in front of them, scrutinizing their actions and commenting into a microphone on what he saw.

Graham was early into video, with pieces in which he taped himself taking a picture of himself. Video-Architecture-Television (1979) documents his individual moves without becoming as generally edifying as his best writing about others. One difference between the world of visual art and that of literature is that the former is far more receptive to genuine eccentrics such as Graham.

Graham, Martha

(11 May 1894–1 April 1991)

Initially noted for her dynamic performing presence, this American modern dance pioneer also developed a unique technique for movement. Trained with the Denishawn company, she broke from its style, which was indebted to ballet and François Delsarte (1811–71), to explore deep motions of the torso, especially “contraction and release.” A barefoot modern to the end (despite an occasional sandal), she nonetheless increasingly encouraged performing virtuosity in her dancers.

In her long, sustained career as a choreographer, Graham created over 200 works, including such early ABSTRACT and EXPRESSIONIST pieces as Lamentation (1930), in which, enshrouded in fabric and poised on a bench, she enacted grief distilled through her movements and gestures. She explored American forms and themes in Primitive Mysteries (1931), inspired by Native American ritual, and in Letter to the World (1950), which was based on Emily Dickinson’s poetry and life. Graham developed narrative dances exploring Jungian theory and Greek mythology in works such as Cave of the Heart (1946) and the evening-length Clytemnestra (1958). She explored alternative narrative devices such as flashback in Seraphic Dialogue (1955). Although the predominant feeling of her work was dark and serious, notable exceptions include the joyous Diversion of Angels (1948) and her last work, the surprising Maple Leaf Rag (1990) to music by Scott Joplin, which poked fun at her own stylistic conventions. For her set designs she invited many notable artists, including ISAMU N OGUCHI. Due to her significance, longevity, and relative accessibility, more has been written about her than anyone else in American modern dance.

—Katy Matheson

Grahn, Judy

(28 July 1940)

Of the women writers acknowledging the influence of GERTRUDE STEIN, Grahn has been the most courageous, understanding as she does the literary possibilities offered by Stein’s more radical work, coupled with Grahn’s personal identification with Stein’s Lesbian sexuality. Grahn’s Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology (1989) ranks among the best for favoring the more challenging texts, even competing with three Stein books edited by me. A favorite subject of Grahn’s own poetry is deeper truths about uniquely Lesbian experience. Metaphormic Consciousness is her own coinage. Many writers have received prizes with donors’ names and sometimes money attached, to be noticed in newspapers (but not in history books). More unique perhaps and thus worth noticing here, is the Judy Grahn Award established during her lifetime (1997) to be bestowed upon others.

Graphic Narrative

(1919)

This, along with graphic novel, has become the accepted term for sequences of visual panels, sometimes including words, that for “reading” depend upon readers’ moving eyes from one frame to another, often by turning printed pages, but also sometimes from upper-left frames across to upper right, and then down eventually to lower right. I prefer Narrative to “Novel,” because many are shorter than book-length, while some aren’t fictional at all. (For early non-fictional graphic narrative, consider James Reid’s The Life of Christ in Wood-cuts [1930], which lacks words, and Charles Turzak’s Abraham Lincoln: A Biography in Woodcuts [1933], which accompany short paragraphs.)

Among the first, with one wordless panel to a page, were FRANS MASEREEL’s oft-reprinted Passionate Journey (1919) and, in America, Hearts of Gold: The Great American Novel (and Not a Word in It –No Music too) (1930), by MILT GROSS otherwise known for his comic strips, this second book in particular suggesting that Graphic Narratives are highbrow comics.

In my anthology Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973) are “Process Poems” by two Brazilians, Moacy Cirne (1943–2014) and Alvaro da Sá (1935–2001), who put within a single page many tiny panels that in sequence suggest a narrative, much as comic strips do when reprinted in books. For me (though not some others) this epithet would include at one extreme certain narratives that are composed entirely of photos (e.g., DUANE MICHALS) and, on another edge, books only of words where “reading” depends entirely upon turning pages, such as EMMETT WILLIAMS’s Sweethearts.

Online must be graphic narratives requiring the viewer to hit a key to move from one image to the next, which is the equivalent of turning the page. By avant-garde standards, ABSTRACT GRAPHIC FICTON represents a higher form. The category Graphic Narratives should not include “narrative painting” that customarily within a single image suggests a moment within an ongoing story.

Graphic Notation

(1920s)

Ever since 1000 A.D., when Guido d’Arezzo drew a line to mark the arbitrary height of pitch, musical notation has been geometric in its symbolism. The horizontal coordinate of the music staff still represents the temporal succession of melodic notes, and the vertical axis indicates the simultaneous use of two or more notes in a chord. Duration values have, through the centuries of evolution, been indicated by the color and shape of notes and stems to which they were attached. The composers of the avant-garde eager to reestablish the mathematical correlation between the coordinates of the musical axes have written scores in which the duration was indicated by proportional distance between the notes. Undoubtedly such geometrical precision contributes to the audio-visual clarity of notation, but it is impractical in actual usage. A passage in whole-notes or half-notes followed by a section in rapid rhythms would be more difficult to read than the imprecise notation inherited from the past. In orchestral scores, there is an increasing tendency to cut off the inactive instrumental parts in the middle of the page rather than to strew such vacuums with a rash of rests. A graphic system of tablature notation was launched in Holland under the name Klavarskribo, an Esperanto word meaning keyboard writing. It has been adopted in many schools in Holland.

New sounds demanded new notational symbols. HENRY C OWELL, who invented tone-clusters, notated them by drawing thick vertical lines attached to a stem. Similar notation was used for similar effects by the Russian composer Vladimir Rebikov. In his book New Musical Resources, Cowell tackled the problem of non-binary rhythmic division and outlined a plausible system that would satisfy this need by using square, triangular, and rhomboid shapes of notes. Alois Haba of Czechoslovakia, a pioneer in microtonal music, devised special notation for quarter-tones, third-tones, and sixth-tones.

As long as the elements of pitch, duration, intervallic extension, and polyphonic simultaneity remain in force, the musical staff can accommodate these elements more or less adequately. Then noises were introduced by the Italian Futurists into their works. In his compositions, the Futurist LUIGI R USSOLO drew a network of curves, thick lines, and zigzags to represent each particular noise. But still the measure and the proportional lengths of duration retained their validity. The situation changed dramatically with the introduction of ALEATORY processes and the notion of INDETERMINACY of musical elements. The visual appearance of aleatory scores assumes the aspect of ideograms. JOHN C AGE, in particular, remodeled the old musical notation so as to give improvisatory latitude to the performer. The score of his Variations I suggests the track of cosmic rays in a cloud chamber. His Cartridge Music looks like an exploding supernova, and his Fontana Mix is a projection of irregular curves upon a strip of graph paper. The Polish avant-garde composer KRZYSZTOF P ENDERECKI uses various graphic symbols to designate such effects as the highest possible sound on a given instrument, free improvisation within a certain limited range of chromatic notes, or icositetraphonic tone-clusters.

In music for mixed media, notation ceases to function per se, giving way to pictorial representation of the actions or psychological factors involved. Indeed, the modern Greek composer Jani Christo introduces the Greek letter psi to indicate the psychology of the musical action, with geometric ideograms and masks symbolizing changing mental states ranging from complete passivity to panic. The score of Passion According to Marquis de Sade by Sylvano Bussotti looks like a sur-realistic painting with musical notes strewn across its path. The British avant-garde composer CORNELIUS C ARDEW draws black and white circles, triangles, and rectangles to indicate musical action. IANNIS X ENAKIS prefers to use numbers and letters, indicating the specific tape recordings to be used in his musical structures. Some composers abandon the problem of notation entirely, recording their inspirations on tape.

The attractiveness of a visual pattern is a decisive factor. The American avant-garde composer EARLE B ROWN draws linear abstractions of singular geometric excellence. KARLHEINZ S TOCKHAUSEN often supplements his analytical charts by elucidatory (or tantalizingly obscurative) annotations. The chess grandmaster Tarrasch said of a problematical chess move: “If it is ugly, it is bad.” Mutatis mutandis, the same criterion applies to a composer’s musical graph.

—Nicolas Slonimsky

Gray, Eileen

(9 August 1978–31 October 1976; b. Katherine E. Moray Smith)

Whereas some distinguished artists design objects (for subsequent reproduction/manufacture), some veteran designers produce fine art, often inadvertently. In the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (NY) is a remarkable Screen (1922) more than 6 feet high and more than 4 feet across with seven rows of lacquered wood panels on thin vertical metal rods. As the panels centered on the rods take various angles, the Screen resembles an elegant Cubist sculpture. However, the panels can be moved on their axes to be flush with each other and thus make a nearly continuous wall. A masterwork of its kind, this MoMA work is reportedly based upon a larger sculpture made for a grand Paris apartment. Either way, preferring WHITE & BLACK art, I’d love to have one in my house.

Though born in Ireland, Gray lived for most of her years in Paris where she was known primarily as a textile designer and, incidentally, as an architect, especially of her own home in Menton, France. In February 2009, a “Dragons” armchair (1917–19) designed by Gray sold at auction in Paris for 21.9 million euros, reportedly setting a record for a work of art initially regarded as decorative.

Green, Paul

(17 March 1894–4 May 1981)

One truth about American culture is that the commercial operations drop nearly everyone. What’s true about Hollywood studios or book publishers is also true about mainstream theater. The playwright Paul Green, born in North Carolina, had a good run on Broadway through the 1920s, culminating with a Pulitzer Prize. He published three collections of one-act plays. However, by the 1930s, his work was dropped; so he went to Hollywood, which disappointed him. What to do?

Just as RICHARD FOREMAN created his own theater not in Broadway or even off-Broadway, as it was known in the 1970s, but within ARTISTS’sOHO where he incidentally lived, so Green returned south before venturing where no major American playwright had gone before –into the provinces, inventing a new form of “symphonic dramas,” as he called them, for PERFORMANCE, mostly outdoors, in various states. From 1937 forward, he wrote and saw produced nearly a dozen of them, mostly recreating historical events through pageantry in settings sometimes near the historic site. Though simple in some respects, they were ambitious in others. More people witnessed them than attended the plays of more canonical American dramatists; likewise more people performed in them. My friend his niece Avery Russell recalls that her uncle would spend his last thirty summers touring among them in his Cadillac, routinely scaring chickens on back-country roads; it was the sort of working trip that no other American writer could make. Perhaps because theater critics rarely looked so far outside New York City, critical literature about Green is sadly slight. May I venture that this appreciation of Paul Green in a canonical book such this might be unique.

Greenberg, Clement

(16 January 1909–7 May 1994)

By common consent, Greenberg was the principal American art critic of the middle 20th century, the one whose essays on the ABSTRACT EXPRESSION-IST painting of the post-war decade seem as smart decades later as they did then (as does his 1939 classic on “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”). As a younger critic Sanford Schwartz (1946) correctly judged in 1987, “Perception for perception, Clement Greenberg is the greatest American art critic.” Whereas his colleague (and competitor) HAROLD R OSENBERG emphasized the process of freely applying paint to canvas (as a surrogate revolution for failed Marxism), Greenberg focused on formally “all-over” imagery extending evenly to the edges of the painting.

Though Greenberg presented himself as a rational, dispassionate observer, some of his particular judgments seem, especially in retrospect, highly subjective. In subsequent decades, he advocated painterly painting, not necessarily abstract, especially against those who preferred painting that incorporated performance, philosophy, or something else. “I regard flatness and the inclosing of flatness not just as the limiting conditions of pictorial art, but as criteria of aesthetic quality in pictorial art,” he wrote succinctly. “The further a work advances the self-definition of an art, the better that work is bound to be.” Simply.

Though Greenberg scarcely published after the mid-1970s, he remained influential, not only as an occasional lecturer but as the touchstone that his successors were continually citing, either inflating or rejecting. Though he resisted accepting an academic appointment, he influenced art history professors emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, though none ever equaled him for literary cogency or esthetic insight.

Greenfield, Amy

(8 July 1940)

Elementary actions like spinning, falling, and rising to one’s feet are laden with meaning in Greenfield’s cinema. Greenfield believes such physical movements can evoke primal experiences recalled by individuals and cultural memories held by generations. Her Element (1973) is a glistening meditation on a solitary female figure struggling through a sea of total mud, but also a metaphor for perseverance and survival. Coming to film from modern dance, Greenfield understands the latent meanings of simple gestures. Though her cinema draws energy from dance, it does not resemble theater. In Element, mud spatters onto the camera lens, reminding us of its presence. In Dervish (1974), a real-time spinning ritual-dance that was videotaped with two cameras, images of the whirling figure dissolve into each other, building a picture that is unique to video. Greenfield consistently tailors the subjects of her films, videotapes, or HOLOGRAMS to the special characteristics of each medium. In her 1979 Videotape for a Woman and a Man, a couple whirls at the end of the work, freezing into immobility and then rushing back to life in shared moments that are electronic and ecstatic. Greenfield’s short film Tides (1980) and her feature-length Antigone (1989) continue the concerns of her earlier works: ordeal; human movement registered and magnified by an active camera; and a fluid treatment of narrative that retroactively upsets our sense of space and time. Quite remarkably, in a 1968 essay for Filmmakers’ Newsletter, Greenfield outlined an artistic agenda very similar to what she would actually do, from Encounter (1969), which echoes STAN B RAKHAGE, to all of her other films. In 2010, You-Tube removed two of her videos until anti-censorship advocates successfully had their presence restored.

—Robert Haller

Griffith, D. W.

(22 January 1875–23 July 1948; b. David Llewelyn Wark G.)

Initially among the most prolific directors of early silent films, Griffith belongs here less for his general achievement than for a single film, Intolerance (1916), which in crucial respects transcended everything made before it. Among the film’s innovations was its structure of telling four separate but interwoven stories (“The Modern Story,” “The Judean Story,” “The French Story,” and “The Babylonian Story”) that were linked by the common theme announced in its title and explained in an opening statement. The technical departure of interweaving four stories (more than a decade before WILLIAM F AULKNER’s structurally similar The Sound and the Fury, 1929) gives the film a fugal form, a grand scope, and a historical resonance previously unknown and subsequently rare.

As the independent film scholar Seymour Stern (1908–78) pointed out, Griffith worked without a script, even editing from memory, meaning there was nothing for his corporate bosses to approve prior to his making the film. The spectacle is a reflection, in Stern’s luminous phrases, of

a creative titan’s hand, moving puppet-forces, but moving them in a resplendent esthetic of coordinated masses, counterpoised rhythms, orchestrated tempos, parallel movements, structured multiple movement-forces, configurations both static and dynamic, visual confluences of timeless space, imagistic symphonies of people, objects, and light: the filmic architecture of history and tragedy beyond emotion and beyond criticism.

The surviving print has occasional verbal frames, contrary to Griffith’s original intention of making a purely visual film with the integrity of a Beethoven string quartet. Griffith also varied the size and shape of the screen, forecasting images of alternative projection, including circular screens and the ratios of CINEMA S COPE.

Perhaps because of the commercial failure of Intolerance, only more modest films would follow. Much of his energies were then devoted to finding better ways for serious directors to fund their films, first by cofounding the collaborative United Artists Corporation (with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks), later by legally incorporating himself, all without sufficient success to permit him to control his subsequent filmmaking. He died alone and forgotten in a Hollywood hotel room.

Griffiths, Paul

(24 November 1947)

In addition to writing several of the best books about modern (classical) music, this prodigious British writer has produced a modest body of highly imaginative writing, initially in librettos for operas by ELLIOTT CARTER and Tan Dun (1957), among other composers, and then in texts that stand alone. Among the latter is a sort-of novel, let me tell you (2008) composed from only the words spoken by Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The Danish composer HANS ABRAHAMSEN also drew on this Griffiths text for a composition similarly named. Not unlike other experimental writers, even those who publish other kinds of texts widely, Griffiths has much unpublished. He also worked as a staff music reviewer for prominent periodicals in both New York and London; the New York Times surprisingly published his authoritative obituaries of major composers long after Griffiths had left. Rare among the individuals featured here, he was rewarded by his Queen with an O.B.E., which is a sort of minor-league knighthood.

Grögerová, Bohumila

(7 August 1921–21 August 2014), and Josef Hiršal (24 July 1920–15 September 2003)

They edited the anthology experimentaální poezie (1967), which (even though it was published in Czechoslovakia) ranks among the best anthologies of C ON-CRETE P OETRY. It included the strongest works not only from their contemporaries, such as EUGEN G OMRINGER, JEAN -F RANÇOIS B ORY, and JOHN F URNIVAL, but from earlier writers, including MICHEL S EUPHOR, RAOUL H AUSMANN, and PIERRE -A LBERT B IROT, only some of which they translated into Czech. Grögerová also produced poetic objects and drawings, in addition to experimental prose, radio plays, and cycles of diaries in the form of literary montages. Hiršal published several books of poetry. Not unlike other prominent writers in minority languages, they both translated literature from the major Western tongues.

Gross, Milt

(4 March 1895–28 November 1953)

Gross was a cartoonist, famous in his time, with sufficient literary ambition to write a book-length narrative that had, as its title page boasted, “not a word in it –no music, too.” In a series of finely drawn pictures various in size (and thus structurally different from a standard cartoon strip), He Done Her Wrong (reprinted as Hearts of Gold) tells of a frontier trapper going into the woods to earn enough money to marry his girlfriend who, while he is gone, succumbs to a city slicker who cons the woman into believing the trapper has died. (J OHN BARTH once quoted the Latin poet Horace saying that if an experimental writer wants to use an unfamiliar form, he or she would be wise to choose a familiar plot, which is what Gross did.)

As representational images devoid of words, this Gross novel is very much the precursor of, among other books, several marvelous, strictly visual narratives of Martin Vaughn-James (1943–2009), whose books Elephant (1970) and The Projector (1971) were published in Canada in the early 1970s. After he moved to Paris, later special Vaughn-James fictions (which need not be translated) appeared in the French literary periodical Minuit.

Another Gross classic is “Hiawatta: Witt No Odder Poems” (1926), which retells in forty pages a familiar Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem with images accompanied by his Yiddish-English. Gross continued such delicious American irony in De Night in de Front from Chreesmas, Dunt Esk (1927) and Famous Fimmales witt Odder Ewents from Heestory (1928).

Grotowski, Jerzy

(11 August 1933–14 January 1999)

From modest professional beginnings directing a theatrical company in the small Polish city of Opole (formerly Oppeln) and then another in Wroclav (formerly Breslau), Grotowski quickly became known for radical stagings. He put the audience for Calderon de la Barca’s The Constant Prince on a four-sided shelf behind a high wooden fence, so that spectators had to stand and peer like voyeurs over the barrier. His production of Stanislaw Wyspiański’s (1869–1907) Akropolis (1904) required performers to build structures through the audience. He also cut and transposed texts, resetting their action.

Grotowski was so successful that, when he returned to America the following year, he gave lectures titled “Misconceptions in the United States about the Grotowski Method.” He wrote provocatively: “The actors can play among the spectators, directly contacting the audience and giving it a passive role in the drama.” For his 1969 New York productions of several plays, he limited attendance to one hundred people and the duration of the PERFORMANCE to only one hour.

In his Theatre Trip (1969), the sometime theater critic Michael Smith (1935) describes a laying area “roughly fifteen feet by twenty-five feet” for Grotowski’s The Constant Prince.

The actors are often within arm’s reach, they play continuously at an ecstatic level of energy, they are sometimes all but naked, their concentration is perfect. The sound and movements they make are indescribably extravagant, and their extravagance is given force by impeccable discipline and control. One looks down upon them from a very close range. One might be examining them under a microscope –but they are full size, human, alive. Grotowski says that the spectator must see the beads of sweat on the actor’s face. The experience is absolutely enthralling, altogether too much to take in.

The theme of Grotowski’s book Towards a Poor Theater (1970) was that performance could exist without lights, music, or scenery. All it required was one performer and one spectator. Grotowski also developed an innovative program for training actors for extraordinary, almost superhuman (e.g. trancelike) performances and inhuman sounds. Much of the influence of the pedagogy depended at the time upon the extraordinary actor Ryszard (Richard) Cieślak (1937–90).

Sometime in the 1970s, Grotowski became, no joke, a Southern California academic, before resettling in Pontedera, Italy, where he died. He was also one of the few individuals featured in this book to get a MacArthur “genius” grant, perhaps because avant-garde stars are more acceptable to certain American funders if they are foreign-born.

Grumman, Bob

(2 February 1941–2 April 2015)

With his regular contributions to the periodical Small-Press Review and his book Manywhere-at-Once (1990), Grumman became a major critic of avant-garde American poetry. His strengths were, first, relating new developments to the high modernist tradition and, then, penetrating close readings of texts that would strike most readers as initially impenetrable. For instance, looking at George Swede’s “graveyarduskilldeer,” Grumman notices,

Here three words are spelled together not only to produce the richly resonant “double-haiku,” graveyard/dusk/killdeer//graveyard/us/killdeer, but strikingly to suggest the enclosure (like letters by a word) of two or more people (a couple –or, perhaps a// of us) by an evening –or some greater darkening.

Very keen on distinctions, Grumman coined useful discriminatory categories where previous commentators saw only chaos: “infra-verbal” and “alphaconceptual” are two examples. Others appear in this book. He also published many books of poetry, some of them featuring poems that mix words and numbers, which, with typical readiness for inventive coinage, he called “alphanumeric.” Not only did his MICROPRESS Runaway Spoon rank among the most active publishers of the best experimental writing but his press’s printed catalog demonstrated how witty the stolid convention of a publisher’s book list can be.

Guerilla Theater

See SAN FRANCISCO MIME TROUPE.

Guerrilla Girls

(1985)

The specialty of this scrupulously anonymous collective is the provocative poster, customarily realized with considerable irony and wit. Such posters appear wherever they can be placed, beginning with the walls of New York’s SOHO but including other venues, such as pages of magazines. The posters customarily have a large-type headline over a series of short assertions. My favorite is headlined “Relax Senator Helms, the Art World Is Your Kind of Place” (1989). Among the assertions, each preceded by a bullet, in ironic reference to advertising styles, are: “Museums are separate but equal. No female black painter or sculptor has been in a Whitney Biennial since 1973. Instead, they can show at the Studio Museum in Harlem or the Women’s Museum in Washington”; “The majority of exposed penises in major museums belong to the Baby Jesus.” These statements are not just true, but stylishly presented; and when radicals are appealing to people receptive to art, that last quality helps. Surprised may I be that decades later no individual has broken the commitment to collective anonymity. Could they all pass without historians ever identifying who they were?

Guggenheim Foundation

(1925)

It was an extraordinary move, really, for an independent entity to give modest sums to artists (and scholars) applying to do whatever they wished for a year or two, and in this respect the Foundation established by the Guggenheim family, in memory of a son who died young, set a good example. Based on private money, rather than state money (or royal money), the Guggenheim Foundation was accountable only to itself. This differed from private patronage, such as PEGGY G UGGENHEIM’s (from the same family), wherein rich people support someone they know, whose work or company pleases them personally, for several years at least. Rather than rely on their own tastes or a single trusted advisor, as most private patrons do, the Guggenheim Foundation established selection committees that would review applications in which supplicants propose the projects that each wishes to pursue.

Over the years, thanks largely to the genuine leadership of its initial principal administrator, Henry Allen Moe (1894–1975), the Guggenheim Foundation differed from less distinguished funders by including genuinely avant-garde artists, including many featured in this book. Of course, it missed opportunities, as when ARNOLD S CHOENBERG applied in the mid-1940s to complete the third act of his opera Moses und Aron; and it wasted profligately, as in awarding four fellowships in the 1930s to a middling composer named DANTE FIORELLO, who vanished physically in the early 1950s.

Whereas Guggenheim grants at the beginning funded those who were young and barely known, it was widely thought in the 1960s and 1970s that the Guggenheim Foundation, less secure in its decision making, would fund only people whose work had already been recognized elsewhere, the Foundation in effect putting its rubber stamp on someone, probably in mid-career, already approved (in implicit exchange for their subsequently acknowledging the Guggenheim tag in their biographies).

Like all arts funders, this patron should get credit for what it actually does, not what it says it wants to do. The best that can be said is that the Guggenheim Foundation has made culture happen that would not otherwise have happened; since much of this new culture was good, the beneficiaries ultimately included a public larger than the initial artist.

Of the later independent foundations, few have equaled the Pollock-Krasner, established by JACKSON P OLLOCK’s widow in the 1980s (with money earned from art, not commerce), in supporting a large number of needy artists (mostly painters and sculptors). Too many other funding programs, by contrast, support remarkably few people, often of indistinct quality, with too much fanfare (aka “publicity”), so that a skeptic observing results inevitably questions why and thus how it selected its beneficiaries, rather than others more deserving, whose work is demonstrably superior.

Guggenheim, Peggy

(26 August 1898–23 December 1979; b. Marguerite G.)

In spite of her personal extravagances and absurdities, she ranks among the great patrons of avant-garde painting. In addition to purchasing works by emerging artists, she also gave them stipends and even for a while sponsored a gallery that showed their work. The historical measure of her success as a patron was that many of those early receiving her beneficence later earned greater recognition. Indeed, good wagering is finally the truest measure for patronage, whether by private individuals, public institutions like universities, or state cultural agencies, most of whom have a record of unsuccessful judgment at the service of good intentions. In Alvin Toffler’s classic warning, “Patrons who were stupid enough or uncultivated enough to support the mediocrities of their period fade into richly deserved obscurity. Only those who guessed right are remembered. The history of patronage is thus biased and selective.” As a family, the De Menils, mostly of Houston, TX, rank among the best. One theme of the museum established in Peggy Guggenheim’s villa in Venice is that she was among those who “guessed right.” Her cousin, Solomon R. Guggenheim (1861–1949), likewise a good guesser, established the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Gutai Art Association

(1954–72)

A group of Japanese artists, trained in various disciplines including law and literature, founded in Osaka by Jiro Yoshihara (1905–72), who incidentally also headed a large cooking oil business, they produced collective paintings and PERFORMANCE pieces, some of them quite spectacular. They favored materials odd to art, such as smoke, colored water, mud, chemicals; they explored time. The first Gutai exhibition in Tokyo, October 1955, included Saburo Murakami’s Paper Tearing and Kazuo Shiraga’s Challenging Mud, both of which were influential. Yoshihara founded a journal named Gutai that lasted a decade (1955–65) and issued The Gutai Manifesto in 1956. Among the other participants were Atsuko Tanaka (1932–2005), Sadamasa Motonaga (1922–2011), Kazuo Shiraga (1924–2008), and Minuru Yoshida (1935–2010).

The theatricist MICHAEL K IRBY describes them as expanding

the means used in the action of painting. One artist tied a paintbrush to a toy tank and exhibited the marks it left on the canvas; others painted with their feet, with boxing gloves made of rags and dipped in paint, or by throwing bottles filled with paint at a canvas with rocks under it.

Kirby continues:

In 1957 the Gutai presented more formal theater works for an audience. A large plastic bag filled with red smoke was pushed through a hole at the back of the stage and inflated. Smoke puffed out through holes in the side. Another presentation employed a large box with three transparent plastic walls and one opaque white wall. Performers inside the box dropped balls of paper into buckets of paint and threw them against the white wall, coloring the surface. Then colored water was thrown against the plastic walls that separated the spectators from the performers.

The critic Udo Kultermann (1927–2013) writes,

The Gutai artists built huge figures after designs by Atsuko Tanaka and lighted them from the inside with strings of colored lamps. The lamps flashed rhythmically, suggesting such disparate effects as outdoor advertising and blood circulation. A moving strip covered with footprints snaked across the forest floor and up a tree. There were also spatial constructions that could be entered, traffic signs, jellyfish-shaped mounds of mud, plastic, and rope, stuffed sacks hanging from trees tied with ribbons.

Shiraga thrashed around for twenty minutes in clay that he had piled in a courtyard. I’ve seen a photo of Ms. Tanaka’s face barely visible behind an abundance of fluorescent tubes mostly in color. As far as I can tell, this major avant-garde group mostly disbanded by the middle 1960s, the individual members pursuing separate, less consequential careers. Yoshihara’s death in 1972 ended it. The name Gutai could be translated into English as “embodiment” or “concrete.”