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A Conversation with Gunther Gerzso Lotte Mendelsohn: Gunther, if I describe your work as non-objective, geometric abstraction, will you argue with me? Gunther Gerzso: Yes and no. Because nowadays it really doesn’t mean anything to be abstract or non-objective. I think one has to reduce it to realistic representation or not. What I do, for instance, is very real for me. When I do a painting I don’t worry about what it is. I just let my emotions go and I worry mostly about the execution of the painting, because the other things come by themselves. LM: You work from a bosquejo, no? A beginning sketch? GG: Well, before I used to work directly, but I ruined too many canvases, and so I thought it would be a good idea to get it down first on a piece of paper. What I do really lends itself to that. There are other artists who have to do their work very spontaneously. I’m not among them. I’m more like the Old Masters who have to resolve everything before they start. Everything has to be in its place and then comes the execution of the painting. Sometimes I change something during the execution of the painting but most of the time I make a drawing first, a very accurate drawing, always to scale. LM: And also in color, no, with color notations? GG: Sometimes. Not always. I usually wait until the next day and I see whether this sketch is to my liking or not. If there is something missing I just put it aside, sometimes for as much as a year, or I make the changes right away. But usually one has to wait until there is a feeling that it clicks. LM: Does something ever not gel? Do you ever go back to something and not like it at all? GG: Yes. As a matter of fact, I have a place in my studio with rejected paintings, which I call “the cemetery” and every once in a while I go through them and I must say that very seldom do I pick one out again to work on. LM: In other words, if it didn’t work, then that’s it. Interesting that you would go as far as executing the painting before you knew, that the scale sketch wouldn’t tell you that, before you started on the canvas… GG: Yes. LM: Graphic expression goes back a long way with you. Will you tell us something about your beginnings? You began in a different way from a lot of other painters. GG: I did not want to become a painter. When I was about 15, I met a man in Switzerland [Nando Tamberlani] who did stage sets for La Scala in Milan. He was almost part of our family there, and from that moment on I wanted to be a stage designer. When I returned to Mexico the next year I never really considered becoming a painter. It was only later that I began to think that stage design was not very interesting, because I became friends with a young man [the painter, Bernard Pfriem] who made my lunch every day in a delicatessen in Cleveland, Ohio, and he would say, “you should become a painter,” and I would say “oh no, no, no” and he would say “oh yes.” It was he who brought me my first canvas and my first brushes and colors. I still have that painting, the first one I did. But it’s not difficult to make a living as a stage designer and to make a living as a painter is very difficult. For instance, I was a stage designer at the Cleveland Playhouse for four years and after these four years I said, “Well I’m going to try to be a painter in Mexico,” and I came here with my wife, and of course it was a disaster, because nobody was interested in what I was doing. And it was just by chance that somebody offered me the chance to design a film. So out of economic necessity I accepted this job in the Mexican motion picture industry and I stayed for 20 years. My impulse to become a painter wasn’t very strong yet. But little by little I kept painting more and more works, and nobody knew about it. I kept putting the paintings in a closet till a friend of mine asked me, “Don’t you think it’s about time that somebody should see these paintings?” And I said, oh no, no, no.” But he insisted, and Inés Amor [of the Galería de Arte Mexicano] came and saw those paintings and she gave me a show. The opening night was a disaster: there were only ten people, of which about eight were my relatives… LM: What year was this, Gunther? GG: 1950. But somebody from Chicago—a very nice lady—bought two paintings.1 And this collector from Chicago [Muriel Newman] said, “You know, you’re going to go places.” I said, “Well, it seems that nobody here is interested.” And the critics in Mexico thought I was really not worth mentioning. But from that moment on, little by little it went up and up and up, till I left the motion pictures and now I just paint. LM: Now you hopscotched for me in your history from Switzerland to Cleveland to Mexico. How did you get to Cleveland and why Cleveland? GG: Because my mother, here in the Calle Hamburgo, had a big house... LM: You were born in Mexico? GG: I was born in Mexico in the Calle Marsella, Colonia Juarez. And my mother had a big house here on Hamburgo, and during the summer she rented out two rooms—because she said “Why should we have all this space?” And one year a stage designer [Arch Lauterer] from the States came to live there and my mother said, “You know my son is very much interested in stage design and all he does since he left school is make these drawings,” and he saw the drawings and said, “You should go to the Cleveland Playhouse, because they accept about twenty students every season. You don’t pay them and they don’t pay you.” And the Cleveland Playhouse accepted me as a student and this is how I started. You had to work as a stagehand to begin with, and the first thing they told me was to get some overalls at Sears Roebuck next door, and for the next five or six months I was shifting scenery, working the rain machine, etc., etc. And then after a year they said there’s nobody here that is interested in stage design and our stage designer is leaving. The Cleveland Playhouse was a pretty important place. LM: This was not summer stock. GG: No, no, no, no. This was the winter season, from September to May. And they had two stages, a big one and a small one. So they told me the stage designer was leaving and why don’t we try it with you? And the technical director, who was a friend of mine, said, “Oh yes, come on!” I said “No, I don’t know enough,” and he said, “No, you’re going to try it.” And I tried it, and I was the designer there for four years and I even taught stage design at Western Reserve University. LM: Was any of your background with architecture? What was your study background? GG: Nothing. I didn’t go to college. The only background I ever had in art was from my mother’s brother, who was a very important art dealer in Europe. He had this house in [Lugano] Switzerland and I was sent over there at the age of twelve to become his heir, because my aunt and my uncle didn’t have any children. I lived with them and I was surrounded by masterpieces. I wasn’t interested but they drilled into me how to look at paintings and what a painting is, and so forth. I preferred playing Cowboys and Indians, but I suppose during these five or six years that I was there I had to learn something. It rubbed off. They were very rigid. For instance, if we traveled in Italy the first thing was always to go to the museum. You had to stand in front of the paintings and say what you thought and then they explained it to you. And all that was special training. I never went to art school, and I never had any art teachers. I only had one man in Mexico who taught me what to do so that the paint wouldn’t fall off. LM: How to prepare a canvas… GG: But that’s all. LM: The things that you do, your paintings, are structural, they are clean. They are a series of planes. I have a very beautiful drawing of yours that I love and it’s called Huacán. It came from your archeological series, and obviously you do not depict pyramids and Indians with feathers on their heads. But it’s there, that magic of the pyramids, the architecture and the color. There is a mood evoked in what you do, even in a small drawing. Now I don’t know if everyone sees that. Your public is small and absolutely fanatic. You’re either passionately involved with what Gunther Gerzso does or you don’t like it. There’s never any lukewarm feeling about what you do from a viewer. I have known you for many years and I was amazed when you had your retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art [Mexico] seven or eight years ago that there was a whole period of your work that had got by me, where you painted torn edges within the canvas. I guess you would call it a kind of trompe l’oeil? GG: No. I don’t think so. First of all you have to go back to what you said before. When I started to paint, I didn’t have any idea of what to do. In those days I was a collector of Mexican paintings, and the first painting I did was very much influenced by Orozco Romero. Now the second one was very much influenced by Old Masters, and the third by something else. And there were always influences of surrealism. When I came back to Mexico [in 1941] and I met the surrealist refugees here, like Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, and we became intimate friends, there was a period where I was very much influenced by the Paris surrealist school. Then one day—I still know the day—I said to myself, “Yes, but I live in Mexico and I’m a Mexican citizen, even though I’m not Mexican by blood, and there should be something that I can interpret about this country and everything that it offers visually and aesthetically, in a new way.” Not like Diego Rivera, Orozco or Siqueiros—even though I am still a great admirer of these people. There should be something else. And it was that simple, because one day it just hit me. That was in 1946 and I did a little painting [Tihuanaco] and that painting is the papa of all the paintings I have done since then. LM: Is it hanging here? GG: No, it’s in Madrid. In those days I used to give away my paintings. And ever since I painted that painting I have been developing this discovery. I’m not sure what it is but it has something to do with this country; it has nothing to do with Europe, except possibly in the sense that the means of expression are European—I mean the canvas, the brushes and the tools—but everything else belongs here. It was also at that time that I discovered Pre-Columbian art and this is why many of the things that I did—and they still are, only it’s a little bit more difficult to see now—were influenced by Pre-Columbian art, by the Mexican landscape. I use the tropical landscape, Pre-Columbian architecture and Pre-Columbian figures as a point of departure in the same way that the Cubists used African art, or Matisse used Persian miniatures or the Renaissance masters used Greek and Roman art. LM: When we talk about departures from Pre-Columbian art, which of course is figurative and massive, are we talking about your use of the volume of these? Because there’s really nothing figurative about anything that you do. GG: Well, to me they’re very realistic. To me they are…well I cannot describe them. Critics have told me, “I’m supposed to write about you but it is so difficult to put into words what you do.” I mean the simplest thing to say would be Man Smoking a Pipe by Cézanne, but the way he did it, that’s very difficult to describe. And people have said to me that my paintings look like stage sets because they are one-dimensional… LM: Oh I don’t see that at all. GG: Of course many people have said many things. For instance a newspaper critic once told me I should design furniture because my paintings remind him of bureau drawers… LM: You can’t explain contemporary art to people, you can’t intellectualize. You either feel it or you don’t. At your retrospective I stood before one of your large paintings and I was moved to tears. I think it was one from the collection of Jacques Gelman, and I remember standing there and feeling absolutely lost because I didn’t have one like it. GG: Well, there are other people who don’t agree. For instance, there was once a lady who came to see us and she looked at my paintings and she said to me, “I would never have one of your paintings. Don’t think I am being rude, but they scare me to death.” And she was absolutely right. My paintings are rather scary and what happens there, under that beautiful surface, is not always very agreeable. What it is I don’t know. There was one man who wrote a poem about me who said my paintings were the representation of Death. I mention all these things because I cannot say they’re wrong. Maybe they are. But then there is another case. We had a laundry woman about twenty-five years ago and I used to throw out paintings and she picked them up and took them home. She was a laundry lady in San Ángel. And once I went to her house and there they were hanging on the wall. And I said, “Where did you get them?” She said “Ah, you threw them away, and you know, they’re very beautiful and I hang them up here.” In other words my paintings appeal to people who are intellectuals and also to those who are not. LM: I think the only criticism that I have every heard of your paintings is that they are cold and intellectual. Now how can something be cold and intellectual? To me that is a dichotomy. GG: Yes. They are cold because they are so controlled that any minute now there is going to be an explosion. LM: But that’s not cold! That’s immediate warmth, no? GG: Octavio Paz wrote a very beautiful two or three pages on me [The Icy Spark]1 and it’s exactly that. He said all this coldness is not true. Underneath there are these volcanoes about to burst. Now all this sounds very nice and I say, “Okay, this is how it is.” Or if somebody says, “We cannot live with your paintings because they scare us to death,” I accept that too. But there’s one thing: nobody is ever indifferent, and I think that is very good. LM: Yes, it’s a black or white situation. They either accept or reject them. GG: Nobody ever rejects them because they are ugly or boring. LM: We’re talking to you on the eve of a big retrospective of your work in Monterrey, Mexico, almost a hundred works at the Museo de Monterrey. I notice that so many of your paintings include the color green. Tell us about the use of green. This, of course, is part of Mexico, isn’t it? Do you want to talk about green? GG: The color green must always have appealed to me. When I worked at the Cleveland Playhouse I was always dressed in overalls and people said that if I took them off they could stand by themselves, because they were so full of paint. And the joke at the Playhouse was that if you wanted to know what the color of the set was going to be for the next play, just look at Gunther’s overalls—and it was always green! Well, maybe green has a very special appeal, but at the same time, it’s not only green. I couldn’t tell you why green appeals to me. I suppose other people like pink or blue, but I would say that more than half of my paintings are a variation of greens and the other half are orange and red. LM: That brilliant, brilliant, beautiful red of yours. I think that one of the most fascinating things about watching you work, if one has the good fortune to see you at work, is that there are two or three works on the easel in various stages. Your way of building up transparencies is a unique and unusual one. GG: This is probably the consequence of the Prussian training that I got from this art dealer uncle of mine. I had to look at paintings and one of the things that he told me was if you have a painting of an apple, it’s not important that it’s an apple, it’s how it is done. And then he told me that the paint has to be transformed into something else, into poetry or into spiritual values. I suppose because of this training, this is what I try to do. Paintings that just have one color don’t appeal to me. A painting has to have something more than that; it has to vibrate, it has to be transformed into something else. Because after all, what is a painting? It’s a piece of cloth, with a wooden frame, and then you push around some paint with a little stick that some poor animal’s hair was put on, and that’s how you do it! But there must be something else; you have to transform all this material—which in itself is nothing—into something else. LM: You use an interesting word, “vibrate” as far as color is concerned, which doesn’t mean the same thing as “vibrant.” You have a special way with transparencies. There was a period of time when you had the centers of things lighter and the outside areas were darker and they moved like flowers growing, like a bud opening, in color. There was that vibrancy and I have never seen anyone else do it. And if you go to a Gerzso exhibit you will see that the painters themselves—you are a painter’s painter—will be up there trying to get sideways to look at your canvases to see how you did that. GG: Well, I think that it’s very simple. It’s very simple because I know how. There were some painters who once came to see me and they asked, “How do you do it?” I always explain, I have no secrets. It’s like saying, “ah, you did a drawing with a pencil! Now you cannot use a pencil.” It’s ridiculous. What happens there on the canvas, with very conventional materials, that’s your own thing. Some painters thought that what I did was too complicated. To me it’s not complicated, because this is the only way I know how. LM: I was interviewing an author the other day and talking to him about the craft of writing, and he told me that when he first started to write he would do an outline of about 10 to 20 pages. But now he does a complete outline of 50 to 60 pages, with everything solved before he writes. And I asked why has the outline gotten longer, has the book gotten longer? And he said, “At my stage of craftsmanship, as a professional, I cannot afford to do something less than perfectly.” GG: Well, that’s true. My paintings take longer now than they used to. Maybe that’s because you try to push ahead, ahead, ahead, or sometimes it’s a great failure or it doesn’t work technically. I thought that it should be easier by now, but no, it’s more difficult and one gets more desperate. Because you feel that you should know better and you think, “Good heavens, I did this now five hundred times and I should know.” And I find out that I still don’t know. LM: Is there a particular point in a painting where you know that it’s not going to work or it is going to work? GG: Oh, yes. LM: Is it always the same time? Halfway through or a third of the way through? GG: Yes. But it happens less now than before, because I plan a painting step by step on a piece of paper and I think about it. I think about it constantly, even if I’m not painting. Even if I’m watching television, I think about my painting. And if I’m looking at a movie, I think about my painting and this is a process that continues. The putting down of the brush on top of the surface is really the last stage. But painting is thinking, thinking, thinking; and what you really do is think about the technique so that the other things that you cannot control—which are completely irrational and come in a very funny way—come out better. A comparison would be a pianist. If he doesn’t know how to play Chopin to perfection technically, he will never get to the interpretation. LM: I have always been impressed by the clean and orderly working environment of your studio. Could you work without it? GG: Well, to me my studio is not so clean as you describe it. For instance, I have an assistant now, and every once in a while he comes in and he gets furious and says, “This looks terrible!” and he gets to work and cleans it. Yes, I’ve seen other people’s studios, but I could not work in a place that was not orderly, where the brushes were not washed every day and the floor was littered with papers. No, I don’t think I could work that way. Besides, the paintings I do don’t require much space so my studio is also partly a library and a sort of living room, because I paint in one corner of my studio. I have another little room about 6 x 6 feet where I do all the dirty work, and since my paintings never get bigger than three feet square…I’m not a Jackson Pollock who needs a garage because he does paintings 30 feet by 20 feet. LM: Do you work with acrylics or oils now or both? GG: Both. In fact every painting that I do now is started in acrylics, and then on top I put oil. LM: And they’re not incompatible? GG: No, no. You’re not supposed to put oil paint on thick acrylic because acrylic always remains flexible and oil paint dries into a hard film and this might crack on top. But I use acrylic very thinly, almost like watercolor. The first time they showed me acrylic paints I said that I would never use them. I thought, “This is terrible, this type of pigment is terrible to work with.” But now I even do acrylics on paper, just acrylics, without any oil. I mean, one learns. LM: There was a period of time in your painting where you used marble dust, you used texture. Are you still doing that or have you gotten away from it? GG: That was when I went to Greece, in 1959. I went to Greece for a visit, and when I came back, one day in my studio I didn’t know what to paint and I said, “I’m going to paint a picture called Souvenir of Greece. And this was the first one of thirty-six paintings. And all these paintings have sand and pumice stone and texture, because the Greek landscape impressed me very much. And the funny part was it impressed me because it looked so much like Mexico. LM: And the light, you have the same kind of light, do you not? GG: And also you have these bare mountains. Of course, the ocean you have is different there. But you have these old buildings and temples…it’s very much like Mexico. LM: Tell me about your incursion into graphics. GG: Well, it’s because of outside influences. I think you were the first one to say, “You should do graphics.” And as usual it took forever for me to decide to do something. I didn’t know anything about graphics, but I did the first one, and the second and a third, and little by little I started learning. And then I was invited to Tamarind, in the United States, in Albuquerque and I arrived there and I was supposed to be artist in residence for two months. And I said, “I don’t know anything about making lithographs,” and they said, “Ah, that’s marvelous, we’ll teach you.” And I did five lithographs with them. And they came out well because there were wonderful people there. And then I did silkscreens. I just completed a book on Pre-Columbian poetry [Del Arbol Florido]1 and it took a year to make these fourteen prints. Silkscreen is a horrible medium, because it is cold, cold, cold and it’s flat and you cannot do any nuances. And I just got mad at the medium and I said, “I’m going to lick you!” And we did, I think. LM: Oh, they are really very beautiful. But you prefer the lithographic medium to the silkscreen? GG: I think the lithograph is more sensuous, if I can use that term; the little details that come out in a lithograph, sometimes by chance, are more interesting than in the silkscreen. I think I am going to go back to Tamarind. They always invite me – they write me love letters saying, “When are you coming back?” They are very nice people. And besides they have this discipline that I adore. You have to be there at eight o’clock in the morning, and you’re not allowed to go across the street, as I once did for an ice cream cone. They said, “Where were you?” I said, “I went across the street for an ice cream cone,” and they said, “This line here, we can’t get it right and you were across the street…” LM: Eating ice cream! GG: And I like that. LM: I want to bring up one more thing. Your painting records. You’ve talked about doing your sketches. I have never known anyone else to keep the kind of records, with a sketch and to scale. You write down each color and what you have used, in that beautiful fine script of yours. They are by themselves an art form. Has anybody told you that? GG: Well, I once showed them to a museum curator and he said we must have an exhibition of nothing else but these. But for me they are very practical. There is this drawing—usually it is done with a ruler—and then on the next page I write what it was I used on the painting. I say first I did this and then I did that, with the date, and then I keep track of exactly how many days I worked on it. Because often I look at a painting later and I have forgotten what I did to get a particular effect. Sometimes when I recall a painting of mine or I see a painting I like, I think, “That’s not bad, how did I do that?” And this is why I write it down. Then you use exactly the same things and it turns out different! That’s one of the great mysteries of painting. For instance, Delacroix used to have an incredible collection of little bottles with colors in them and one was called, “Very Good for Highlights on Horses’ Eyes!” or “Very Good for Gypsies’ Feet!” And this is an illusion that painters have. They put this in a little bottle and they think, “One of these days when I paint another gypsy I’ll have this color. And then it turns out that when they use this color, something goes wrong. LM: And God forbid that one of those little bottles of paint should dry up; they would really be in trouble. GG: Exactly. Transcribed and edited by Mary-Anne Martin
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