A conversation with George Earl Ortman

First published in 2010 in Geoform, a curatorial project by Julie Karabenick.
Republished with permission of the author.

Interview by Julie Karabenick

George Earl Ortman was born in Oakland, California in 1926. He studied art at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland from 1947-48; with Stanley Hayter at Atelier 17 in New York City in 1949; at the Atelier André Lhote in Paris from 1949-50; and at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York City from 1950-51.
In 1953 Ortman and the actress, Julie Bovasso, founded the off-Broadway theater, Tempo Playhouse, in New York City. This theatre group introduced the work of Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet and others to an American audience. During the same year, Ortman had his first solo exhibition at the Tanager Gallery in New York City. Since that time he has had 38 solo exhibitions across the US and in Canada.
Ortman taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1960-65, serving as co-chairman of the Fine Arts Department from 1963-65; at New York University from 1963-65; at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey from 1966-69; and at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI as Head of the Graduate School Painting Department from 1970-91.
His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965, a Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003, and an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant in 2008. Ortman’s work may be found in numerous private, corporate and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Over the course of your career, your art has been described in a striking variety of terms—surrealist, minimalist, symbolist, geometric, pop, optical—to name a few.
I would like simply to be called an artist. I’m concerned with exploring the possibilities presented by the picture plane and expressing new ideas with materials and process.

I have always been interested in what makes art. How is it that space, form and color painted on a flat surface can create a kind of magic?

Over time, I studied the use of signs and symbols in painting and theater. I was especially drawn to the paintings of Miró, Klee and Kandinsky. I was very impressed by the theater of Samuel Beckett. He could capture a sense of place and situation by a single symbol, such as an old shoe or tattered hat. The power of his intellect and his memory recall were extraordinary.

In my very early works, I incorporated objects and shapes intuitively.

The meanings of these objects and shapes were not clear to me at that time. Looking at these pieces years later, the shapes and objects have more meaning to me. However, they did not have the clarity and ability to communicate that I feel more simple geometric symbols and signals have; they were more an abstract experience of nature.

Not long into your career you began to focus primarily on geometric shapes.
As I worked, I began to simplify my forms. Regular geometric shapes were easier to make—easier to cut from wood—than were more complex organic shapes.

I grew fascinated with these forms—shapes like the square or triangle that we see all around us. I wondered what these forms meant. How had geometric forms been used as a language? This led me to look at art more broadly, to look, for example, at primitive art, art of different cultures, art of the insane, children’s art and folk art.

To the square I attached the meaning of intellect or knowledge. The circle to me was the feminine—the intuition or the memory of our nature. I felt the triangle reflected the union of man and God, the earth and the heavens.

From the outset you worked with a broad range of materials.
I’ve always been interested in exploring ways to put a picture together. Using simple geometric forms, I’ve experimented with many different materials. I like to work with contrasts—smooth and rough, hard and soft, recessed and projected on the flat picture plane.

The nature of the materials themselves can become symbolic. Fabricating with metal—aluminum—instead of canvas, and putting it next to a symbol made from plaster is to me an interesting idea to work with. The aluminum suggests the cold machine hardness of an industrial world; the plaster and the painted canvas the sensuous, the soft—more reflective of our inherited nature.

You’ve made a number of large banners.
In the early 70s, the dealer, Marian Goodman, commissioned a group of artists to make banners. This posed an interesting color problem for me. I would make a drawing, then with color sample cards, I visualized the colors and their weights, and marked them so a fabricator would be able to achieve the results I wanted. I’ve made 17 banners, the largest being 21 x 21 feet.

In your reliefs you work with contrasts of color and depth across the picture plane.
There seems to be something magical that occurs when you alter the perception of color through the use of relief. For example, we generally experience light colors as coming forward and dark colors as receding. However, if I paint a square a dark yellow and physically project it one inch forward on a lighter yellow surface, the darker yellow seems to come forward.

You’ve also achieved relief effects working with tapestry.
I designed the pieces and had them woven about two inches deep. Areas could then be shaved down according to my specifications. The tapestries were done in India.

Since your early work, you’ve often incorporated objects into your constructions and sculptures.
When I use objects in my work, they must transform their physical presence in order to achieve a complete reality.

That reality for me is a synthesis of an object’s physical properties and other ideas it suggests.

Geometric shapes have formed the basis for a number of chess sets you’ve constructed.
I have made six chess sets. I make them using the geometric vocabulary of my constructions.

Let’s look more closely at the development of your art. You were born in Oakland, California in 1926.
Yes. As a young man, my grandfather had worked with Thomas Edison in Chicago. He fell in love with California and opened George Earl Ortman Electric. During the Depression, he lost the business, but my father got a position at Mills College, and at age five I began art classes for children there. I later spent two years in the Navy and the Naval Air Corps. When I got out, I used the GI bill to begin art school at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1947.
In 1949, I moved to New York City and studied with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17. Hayter was extremely bright and talented. His atelier was cosmopolitan and very friendly. Experimentation was encouraged. I liked the Surrealists’ great freedom and the fact that they worked from the imagination. I felt that these painters created a new space in which to express their vocabularies. I, too, wanted to create my own space to house my furniture, my vocabulary.

It was in Paris that you first began to actually cut into your canvases. How did this come about?

At that time I felt unsure about what I was doing. A friend, Enrique Zañartu, told me to lock myself in my room and just draw. After two months, I asked myself why I was just drawing things. Why not bring some of the outside in? Why not build a door rather than draw a door on the picture plane? Why not actually build a window on the picture plane rather than draw it?
I began doing mixed media constructions—paintings on canvas into which I incorporated doors and boxes with objects inserted into them. Integrating objects into the canvas induced a kind of schizophrenic sense of two and three dimensions at work simultaneously.
Beginnings, done in November 1949, was the first time I cut shapes in the picture plane. The large plane is sky, the other three are levels in the earth. This construction is suggestive of growth.
The objects in the cutout shapes are compositions made with 1/8″ dowels and thread. Their meaning is beyond me, though perhaps not back when I made the piece.

One of these constructions, Fertile Plant, looks like a surrealist image with an actual enclosure below it.

There’s a plant-like image and at the horizon line are doors opening as if into the earth. The box contains dowels that suggest roots.
At the time, I was using hand tools to make my constructions, and the cutting process was quite difficult. I decided to make things easier by simplifying the shapes I was using. After all, a square or a circle is easier to cut and back with wood than a complex free form.
The use of these simplified shapes began to get me interested in the language of geometric art. I wondered where in the world these forms came from. I recall that as a boy, I used to do a lot of camping with friends. We used symbols and signs to mark our trails that American Indians had used, and back then, I had a whole scrapbook of them.
Unfortunately I was only able to bring back two of the seven constructions I made in Paris when I returned to New York. When I arrived, I found that Abstract Expressionism was going full blast. The Club had formed, and I was asked to join.

The Club—a meeting place for artists and, most famously, the Abstract Expressionists—that had opened on East 8th Street in 1949.
I had known several painters in New York before I left for Paris, so when I came back I renewed my acquaintance with them. The work of these painters was non-objective and abstract. I abandoned the constructions for painting for a while, but this didn’t work out. The constructions were more interesting to me than anything else, so I returned to them.

In 1953 you had your first solo exhibition at the Tanager Gallery, one of a cluster of emerging artist-run galleries on 10th Street in the Lower East Side.
This was a very tough time for American artists. You had all these GIs coming back from Europe and graduating from art schools with very few places to show. We were all poor, and no one was buying art. We were receiving no critical attention. The few uptown galleries there were at that time were primarily showing European artists.
The Tanager Gallery was begun by a group of artists who knew each other in Italy—Angelo Ippolito, Fred Mitchell, Bill King, Lois Dodd and Charles Cajori. One day I was walking home from my job at a bookstore and I went in. They soon invited me to become a member. The Tanager was the first co-op gallery in the 50s, originally on 4th Street, then it moved to 10th Street.
A turning point for the co-ops came when the Tanager gallery received critical attention from a major reviewer, Stuart Preston of The New York Times, for a one person exhibition by John Grillo. In 1953 I had a show at Tanager with sculptor, Calvin Albert. I exhibited prints and two constructions.

At this time you were meeting people involved in theater.
I was then married to the actress, playwright and teacher, Julie Bovasso. Actors always seem to be talking about how bad American theater is, so one evening I suggested that we build our own theater and put on plays we thought should be performed. Julie and I found a loft, raised what money we could, and founded Tempo Playhouse on St. Marks Place. We decided to open with Jean Genet’s play, The Maids. It was well received. The critic, Richard Watts of the New York Post, listed it as one of the 10 best productions of the year—quite an honor for a theater that could seat only 120 people!

How did your engagement with the work of these playwrights who rejected the realist tradition and focused on the essentials of the human condition influence you?
We put on the Genet play, two plays by Ionesco, and one by Ghelderode. At that time I also became acquainted with the play, Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett. We weren’t able to acquire the play, but reading it opened new doors for me. Beckett, who was a scholar as well as a superb writer, made a lifelong study to find what was truth, what in our education and experience was real and true.
The play showed me a way to work with allegory in my constructions. I could then think in terms of a dictionary of symbols and signs that I could use to express my ideas.

In 1957 you had a solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery.
I showed a number of constructions that were quite surreal. They had drawers and doors and parts that moved. They invited participation by the viewer.

Let’s look at a few of these constructions.

Time Piece was one of the first constructions I made after returning from Paris.
This was the first time I incorporated a readymade object. The work suggests the idea of nature contrasted with the machine.
Another construction from this time, Harmony, brings together male and female. Here, the roundness, curves and sensuousness of the female and the angular, solid, bold presence of the male are in visual harmony.

We see a life’s journey symbolically represented in the construction Journey of a Young Man.
The journey begins in the far left panel with a single egg that symbolizes innocence. The man grows in awareness, conforms—one eye, then comes the central target-like circle with a hole symbolizing disillusionment.

Next comes chaos, then full awareness, and finally a return to innocence in the final panel, again with a single egg. This was not the best of times for me. I was very poor, Julie and I were divorcing, and life was rather grim. The innocence with which I had begun my journey had taken many blows, and I wanted to express that in the construction.

In the same year you represented life’s journey in a far more simplified fashion.
Yes, Stages of Life was also made in 1957. It was the first work in which I limited the shapes to a purely geometric vocabulary. I had replaced drawing with simple geometry and a harder, more mechanical surface. In my very earliest use of geometric forms, I was simplifying shapes so that they would be easier to fabricate. Here, I wanted visual simplification. I wanted to eliminate all that I felt unnecessary and to express life’s patterns and repetitions.

The first of the three large squares has a triangle with a floating ball inside a square opening, the second large square contains a square with a floating triangle inside a circular opening, and the third square has a circle enclosing a cube floating within a triangular opening.

And this sculptural piece?
Cube, made at the same time as Stages of Life, was the beginning of the use of primary colors in my work.

In 1957 you were also in a group exhibition with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, among others, at Leo Castelli’s gallery. Some writers have noted links among your work and theirs.
“In many ways, Ortman’s work is a missing link between post-war abstraction and the geometric art of the 1960s. As such it fits neatly beside the occult assemblage of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in a progression away from Abstract Expressionism towards something both concrete and revelatory.” (Mitchell Algus, 2006).
These exhibitions were a departure from Abstract Expressionism. They opened up a whole new world of experimentation for artists. Many continued the development of new forms and media, and this would lead to the development of Pop art in 1962.

Your constructions continued to become more geometric and minimal, anticipating the Minimalist movement of the 60s.
I did a group of largely white on white constructions that featured the square, the circle, the triangle, the star, the diamond and the cross. I showed these at the Stable Gallery in January, 1960, and they met with a great deal of success.

Again I was trying to do something innovative plastically, and I concentrated a lot on surface treatment. I put smooth plaster surfaces next to rough areas collaged with pieces of canvas. Over the series, these works grew more simple and minimal—as can be seen in Circle and Triangle.

You were also making brightly colored geometric constructions.
At this point, my vocabulary was pretty well established. I like to use raw color—intense and almost straight from the tube.

Or sometimes I’d work mainly in monochrome. I was exploring the nature of space through a combination of advancing and receding colors and protruding and recessed surfaces.

As you continued to do constructions, you experimented widely—with color, materials, complexity and scale.
I admired Odilon Redon’s use of color for its intensity and originality. And I admired the Synthesists’ liberation of color from representation. Gauguin’s free use of color released the imagination.
Oracle was the first construction in which I thought of color symbolically. Here, the yellow represents innocence, the red passion, and the blue spiritual search.

Here we see yet another experiment in relief construction.
Lighthouse and Metallurgy were among the first constructions I made with metal. Metal definitely unleashed a different mood—it reflected technology and the industrial age.

And you continued to make free-standing sculptural works like Wall or the two totem-like works shown below it.
I worked on tall columns from the 1960s onward. These columns suggest totems, with each section reading as a separate unit. The totem form interested me because of its allegorical prospects, a progression of symbols on a tall form. Some of the shapes in the columns below are letter forms.

As we’ve seen, you made a number of chess sets using a geometric vocabulary. Here’s an early one from 1962.
It took a long time for me to conceive the first one. I wanted to make a chess set using the vocabulary I was using in my constructions. Some chess pieces were easy to align with my forms. The castle: the square—strength. The bishop: the cross—religion. The queen: a circle—woman. The king: the diamond—communication from man to the heavens. The knight and the pawn took a lot of thought. The knight: the heart—romantic, erratic. And last the pawn: the arrow.

It’s interesting that you also have worked with different types of fabric.
When making a tapestry, I would make drawings, select the colors, and note the depths I wanted. Then the tapestries were woven in India. The pieces were woven several inches thick, then cut down with a shaving machine to create the depth of relief I specified.

And your large banners?
For the banners I would make drawings to scale and select the colors. They were then made from felt under my supervision by a fabric house in New York City.

In addition to your many geometrically-based reliefs and sculptures, from the early 60s through the late 80s, you also developed a large series called Imitations. Based on your intensive studies of great master paintings, you both created your own versions of them and derived purely nonobjective paintings and constructions from them. How did this series come about?
At that time I was moving away from more minimal works and dealing with symbols as a kind of parade of relationships. I hoped that presented together, the symbols would communicate ideas.
There were a number of possible sources for the Imitations. First, I had studied at the atelier of André Lhote in Paris. This experience may have influenced my thinking about the figure as something I could geometricize. I also read in February 1960 that some psychologists were giving patients geometric shapes to arrange instead of the Rorschach inkblot test. I found this idea intriguing.

And you’d always been interested in what a work of art could tell you about its creator, the culture and the times.
This has been an ongoing interest. I thought that I might be able to find out something about the personality of the painter by taking apart his work, breaking it down using geometry and trying to bring out its essence.

You began by drawing from models.

I would pose a model, do a drawing, and then pull out the geometry. I then made constructions like Eve I, II and Adam based on these studies.

This work led into my study of old master paintings. First I made a painting based on Matisse’s

The Piano Lesson. As you can see, I turned the boy’s head into a wheel or machine shape, and I placed a small tape player behind the painting to play a recording of the human heartbeat.

My next attempt was based on Botticelli’s Primavera.

Again, I would begin with studies, looking for geometric configurations among the figures.

I would isolate the geometry and gradually remove the figurative elements.

In Primavera I found the geometry I was looking for. Here is my figurative version of the painting.

From the central figure of Venus, I made a number of studies and then a construction.

JK: From this extensive Imitations series, let’s look at two more master paintings—first Les Poseuses (The Models) by Seurat.

GO: Seurat designed his pictures with shapes so that, if read as flat, you would have an abstract painting. This was very advanced thinking for 1886. I made drawings, once again looking for the geometry.

In my painting of Les Poseuses, I attempted to find a geometric scheme in the composition.

It was primarily in the center figure that I found the geometry I was looking for. I used it to make three paintings and a construction, all with the same composition but different colors.

The construction, also called Solange, depicts the modern female.

This painting is an abstract conception of the structure of Seurat’s painting.

You also made many works based on da Vinci’s painting, The Last Supper.
This was the painting that I spent the most time studying. It is a magnificent piece. I began shortly after the Seurat Imitation. I found Les Poseuses a most complete and realized painting plastically. I now wanted to work with themes, with allegory, and The Last Supper was the painting to learn from Da Vinci used four events written about in the Gospels, The Holy Communion: this is my blood, one of you will betray me, they turned and argued with each other, and I am the way. The use of the figures’ gestures and the capturing of the actions like a photographic snapshot communicate the event.Da Vinci’s construction of the painting started with a geometric plan. Employing one point perspective, he then had a frontal plane that was the table and the apostles.

As may be seen in my study, the apostles were posed in such a way as to be in frames of diamonds.

Here are two studies of individual groups of figures.

And here is a study with the figures omitted.
The painting is readily identifiable even without the figures because of the one point deep perspective with the table that runs across the picture establishing a frontal plane on the deep space.

And here is my abstraction of the painting.

And this is a study based on the painting.

While working on this project, I learned that some scholars believed that the table was U-shaped rather than the long table portrayed by da Vinci. So I decided to do some paintings with a U-shaped table and, using da Vinci’s diamond structure, draw the apostles in different poses. This is a study for the painting.

And here is the painting. I attempted to create an interior close to the period and to dress the apostles in the manner of biblical times.

Below is a large non-objective paintings you made based on the U-shaped table composition.
And also using da Vinci’s spatial plan.

While working on this project, the writings of Samuel Beckett were also of much interest to me. I feel that working on the da Vinci and rereading Beckett led directly to constructions based on urban America.

Previously, you had taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1960 to 65, at New York University from 1963 to 65, and at Princeton from 1966 to 69. From 1970 to 91, you were head of the Graduate School Painting Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, not far from Detroit.
Yes. My late wife, the painter, Conni Whidden, and I moved to Bloomfield Hills and took up residence at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1970. This was just three years after the riots, and Detroit was rapidly declining. People were leaving the city and moving to the suburbs. The environment in Detroit was not good.
Cranbrook is a rather special place. Twenty miles north of Detroit, it was built in 1930. It houses a boys’ school, a girls’ school, a nursery school, a science museum, an art museum, and a graduate school of the arts. All of this is on 600 acres, and it was designed and built by Eliel Saarinen. It is quite spectacular.

You did a group of constructions, some of them quite large, based on your impressions of Detroit.
In works like Motown Rhythm & Blues, I wanted to reflect the violence going on in Detroit, the decadence and decay, the decline of religion. The hands are taken from The Last Supper.

 

Jefferson Avenue is also part of this series that I made during my last years at Cranbrook.

And this very large work, Life Styles?
This piece is more autobiographical. Individual areas refer to the various styles of my work over the years—the geometry and symbols, the early constructions, the use of allegory.

Allegory is also another very large work from this period.
Allegory begins with the lower left panel, Beginnings—the beginnings of life, ritual, religion, followed by Birth, upper left panel—the spread of religion.
Schism, upper right panel, indicates dissolution, and Holocaust, below it, destruction.

You moved back to the East Coast in 1993 to work both in Castine, Maine and New York City. How did this relocation from the Midwest affect your art?
My works since 1960 have been architectural, that is, the art of designing and erecting physical structures. However, when I returned to New York, the change was dramatic. Certainly the environment had been one of buildings in the 1960s, but during the 90s and the last decade, New York City has become a mecca for architects from all over the world to have the opportunity to realize their ambitions. Their influence is quite apparent in sculpture and vice versa.
I made about 30 smaller constructions.

These works seemed to come more or less automatically. They would usually begin with a shape or form, then this would suggest something else.

Many of these constructions are very colorful.
There is no reason for the selection of colors other than they pleased me.
I think these pieces are about color and light.

From 1992 through 1996, you worked on a large, four-part piece called A Portrait of Samuel Beckett.

I began to work on the Beckett piece at Cranbrook. The ideas for the Birth and Life panels came quickly, but it was several years before I could resolve the Death panel. The fourth panel, Legacy, contains references to what I felt were his finest theater pieces.