Joseph Plaskett. Artist Master At Ninety Years

Joseph Plaskett. The Artist Master at Ninety Years

The catalogues are sumptuous in Victoria and Vancouver where three of his seven Autumn, 2008, shows are being held.  Admirers of fifty years – and more – fill the galleries to feast on works new and old and to take Plaskett’s hand again, to share the radiant personality.  He is somewhat deaf now (prizing his good sight), and as attractive, warm, and witty as ever.

The new paintings explode.  The artist master is in command.  “Simpler” (?) than twenty years ago, sharper in colour, the tabletops graced with flowers, plants, vase forms, against grounds almost deliberately challenging, speak relentlessly of a master’s hand at work.

For those wanting to see a diminution of artistry at ninety years, they must go elsewhere.  But the idea itself – isn’t it misplaced, someone wanting to see diminution?  Perhaps not.  For the story of this most attractive of men with superb and enormous production is a story of Special Rejection, rejection that bites deep and has important consequences.  It is – as we shall see – a posture that even affects many long time friends and (?) supporters.

The story is both unbelievable and simple.  Beginning in abstraction, studying with (among others) Hans Hoffman in New York, Plaskett “found himself” when he turned to representational painting.  There he has worked for at least sixty years.  And there he has been misunderstood – as I say – even by intelligent, critically acute, and, apparently, sympathetic friends.

How did he dare turn to representation at the time when the U.S. was imperializing taste with the New York School, trying to push the Europeans (especially the French) aside to establish (the U.S. hoped) the vital centre of new artistic creation in the U.S.A., raising the flag of the non-figurative for all to follow?  How did Plaskett dare?  He never really dares, consciously.  He simply lives what he is, something perhaps more maddening than calculated daring, open aggression, and attack.

It’s true that he has held the line publicly, but in a musing way.  And it is perhaps galling to some that – writing a far better prose than most art critics – he quietly claims his space.  In one article – in the late 1960s? – he suggested that he was perhaps the real avant-garde, the true trail blazer, not following the ruck but finding in the real – nature and human nature – materials, stimulus, suggestion, inspiration to practice every skill the visual artist can concentrate and exploit.

He did so.  He has done so brilliantly in oil and pastel, in portrait, still life, landscape, and the plumbing of the inner depths of personality, of time, and of the enchanted object.  His “real”, his “representative” art is never, ever, merely – or even nearly – that.  To play with a phrase of his own in the Vancouver, Bau Xi gallery catalogue, he has fought “to reconcile the appearance of Nature with the tyranny of pure form”.

But much more.  He has fought “to reconcile the appearance of Nature with the tyranny of pure form” while asking what the appearance of Nature is.  For Nature is – whatever else – object in time, object (whether human or non-human) in a shifting universe of the real, object that reaches from the past to comment upon the present, object which discloses the psychology of the present, of the painter and his potential to trap and to create the beautiful.

There’s the rub.

There, I believe, is the final key to Plaskett’s “Special Rejection”.
Over decades, a large, discerning, critical, and artistically sophisticated audience has been attracted to his work – constituting, at one and the same time, an artistic “underground” and a visibly “mainstream” group.  While that has been so for sixty years, Plaskett has been marked by what I have called “Special Rejection”.  He has been politely, contemptuously, studiously rejected by those who might be called the gatekeepers of Official Art History.  They grant “seriousness” to an artist’s work, ”importance”, and a place in Meaningful Art History.  They have very great power because they control the publication of “serious” Art Books and entrance to major Public Galleries.

If you read Mia Johnson’s “preview” of  Plaskett’s B.C. exhibitions, you will learn his “works are in public art gallery collections from Prince Edward Island to Vancouver Island, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria”. (PREVIEW, Sept/Oct 2008).

That statement is misleading.  The oldest British Columbian at work as a major artist, he is ignored by the Vancouver Art Gallery.  Holdings of his work there and in the National Gallery of Canada are an insult.  Both galleries refuse to mount an exhibition of his work.  That is the way – as gatekeepers of Official Art History  - they exercise their power.  Either gallery holding a (travelling) retrospective of a hundred or a hundred and fifty works selected from his best over sixty years would ignite an explosion.  Public Gallery goers would realize they have been cheated, that in their midst a great talent has been shoved aside for reasons of “High Art Politics”.

What could those politics possibly be?

They are the politics of achieving acceptability as Public Gallery Operators in North America.  Joseph Plaskett, as I have said “found himself” when he turned from abstract to representational art at the height of twentieth century non-figurative tyranny.  He was, moreover, literate and witty about his choice. To those two barbarisms must be added his submergence in the Unpardonable Sin since the 1950s.  He has exulted in the beautiful, in experiencing the beautiful, and in creating it, discovering - where the appearance of Nature meets the tyranny of pure form - a possibility of creating something rapturously delightful to the eye, to the body’s sense of form, to the sense in the viewer that the work before him or her may be hauntingly simple, obviously representational, and clearly recognizable – but, at the same time (as with all great art in history) – the whole of it infinitely greater than the sum of its parts and greater, especially, in its power to move the viewer to wonder, delight, and to new experience.

How dare he?

How, in that light, could the U.S. Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, for instance, hold up her head at the next Conference of Public Art Gallery Directors in Fort Worth, Texas, or Boise, Idaho, if she arrived there from holding a major (travelling) retrospective exhibition of Joseph Plaskett’s work?  Impossible.

The Public Gallery Operators in North America present shows of figurative and representational artists.  But they are usually people – the artists – who do not soil their vocabulary with the word “beauty”, and who do not work “in your face” to create the beautiful.  The unspoken rule of the Public Gallery Operators in North America is that the dictates of U.S. imperial taste must prevail – the dictates set out when the U.S. attempted to become the centre of “new art”.  What are those Public Gallery Operators to do with an artist with a huge following for whom their dictates are meaningless?

 Plaskett is a “contemporary artist”.  He knows art history.  He appreciates much since Picasso’s Blue Period and many, many major non-figurative artists. In his latest work he uses objects to hand – Chinese vases, flower pots, glassware, potted plants, ceramic forms, vegetables and fruit, tablecloths, freshly cut flowers.  Deceptively simple – even simplistic – the paintings reconcile the appearance of Nature with the tyranny of pure form.  A brighter and more daring colourist than Matisse, playing – if you like – with Mondrian, insisting on colour as a powerful structural force as well as a surprising pictorial addition, inviting a “re-vision” (by the viewer) of everyday objects, and completely exploding the conventional “florist’s bouquet” until the “appearance of Nature” becomes “pure form”, Plaskett is believed, often, to be a “mere” representational painter. 

I said that even his admirers often continue the blank idiocy of the Public Gallery Operators.  The introductory essay in his superb Bau Xi Gallery catalogue is by long-time art-friend Abraham Rogatnick.  He seems, to this reader, to be wholly in the grip of Public-Gallery-Operator-Speak and, sadly, plain nonsense.

Plaskett, for Rogatnick, has a “personal vision of a romantic world”.  That misreports, and it excludes him nicely from “real art” of the day.  Moreover, the artist occupies, for Rogatnick, a “deliberately limited universe of his own making”.  Quite.  (What artist doesn’t?)  As does Emily Carr, E.J. Hughes, Tom Thomson, Anne Savage, David Milne, Matisse, Cezanne, Monet, Oviloo Tunnillie, Gathie Falk, etc. etc. 

The effect of Rogatnick’s language is to isolate and exclude Plaskett as if he is a somehow self-limiting and limited artist.  From there, Rogatnick concentrates on the unimportant and the anecdotal in Plaskett’s use of interiors and objects, as well as the social and the mostly artistically unimportant things about his life.  Barely touching upon the artistry of Plaskett, Rogatnick retails the over-the-back-fence chatter about Plaskett’s living spaces. 

To embark on a meaningful consideration of Plaskett’s artistry   would be to be making claims – that he is “serious”, “major”, “important”, significant in Art History.  Rogatnick, however, is not alone.  Many of Plaskett’s admirers – as I have suggested – have been completely taken in by the Public Gallery Operators line. 

The Public Gallery Operator attitude to Plaskett must change.  It must; but it probably won’t soon, the dictatorial hegemony in place being very, very powerful.  If our civilization manages to survive its suicidal determination, a hundred years from now a reckless, young, independent viewer of art will take up a cause and push it to conclusion.  He or she will write articles and stage exhibitions until the National Gallery of Canada, celebrating the wonderful find and mythologizing the long neglect will stage a major (travelling) retrospective of the twentieth and twenty first century master, the astonishing Canadian artist, Joseph Plaskett, too, too long unrecognized as a superb artist.  And the National Gallery of Canada catalogue will ask: “What strange conjunction of forces let Plaskett go unrecognized by the chief Public Gallery Operators of more than a hundred years? It is too puzzling a question.  We simply cannot think of an answer.”