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Sometimes even the best of us get lazy about looking at and appreciating art; and I’m pretty far from being the best. So it was that I found beauty, brilliance, and a slice of humble pie; not in a grand gallery or magnificent museum, but in a lowly service office – the very picture of disposable surroundings. For months I blindly marched through the gray-blue and wood-panelled halls, until one day, on a Diet Coke run, I noticed the artworks dutifully hung along every stretch of the office.They were contemporary and decidedly abstract paintings. Granted, these were only reproduction prints cheaply hung and cheaply lit (we’re not talking the Tate here – maybe the Tate’s bathroom though) but there they were just like you would find in any hotel, resort, lift lobby or waiting room. These ‘invisible artworks’, these camouflaged canvases, are everywhere, and yet go completely unnoticed. Take a look around – if you’re in any kind of a public or corporate setting you should spot three pieces in the time it takes you to read this column. And while the vast majority are decorative at best – and deadening at worst – sometimes you find something that’s honestly very good.
‘Paul Jenkins’ was the name scrawled at the bottom of one of these prints. Never heard of him. But there he was, popping up in New York in the 1950s studying at the Art Students League under prominent painter Yasuo Kunioyshi, and associated with a movement called ‘Post-painterly abstraction’, specifically colour field painting. Now, most of us have seen Mark Rothko’s famous colour field paintings (or more likely one of the ubiquitous copies), but we have missed the work of revered, though less iconic painters like Helen Frankenthaler, who invented a whole new genre of colour
field art.
Instead of manipulating paint on top of the canvas like everyone else throughout the history of painting was doing, she worked with raw unprimed canvas and allowed thinned paint to seep into the very fabric, staining in an image, and then manipulated it from there. She changed the rules by questioning the fundamental process of painting, and it allowed other seminal painters like Morris Louis to take this idea even further. Today we take this style of pouring paint and staining canvas for granted, since the process and results have been endlessly copied, but in 1952 it might as well have been four Brits with identical haircuts playing rock music.
Unfortunately, outside of Japan, Korea and the internet, in Asia we don’t often see these contemporary artworks. From a new collector’s standpoint these are good artists to look into because they’re established, readily available at all price levels (one of my favourites, Sam Francis, has original silk screens starting at $15,000), easy to appreciate and, most importantly, beautiful to look at. They also have the gravity that comes from historical importance, which means they’re safe to hold over a long period
of time.
So the next time you’re in transit, take a moment. Beauty and inspiration can strike even a Diet Coke run.