Text and image: Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens

Contributed by Sharon Butler / I had some questions for Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens — artists, writers, spouses who have a two-person exhibition of abstract paintings on view at Texas Gallery in Houston through December 16. After they were evicted from their Tribeca loft a couple years ago, they decamped to Litchfield County, where they both have studios in their home — a beautifully converted auto body shop. In her seventies, Fendrich is a Professor Emerita of Fine Arts and Art History at Hofstra University and is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood. After writing regularly for The Chronicle of Higher Education for many years, she now writes fiction and contributes art reviews to Two Coats of Paint. Plagens, in his eighties, is the art critic at The Wall Street Journal and is represented by Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York. My interrogation about the evolution of their painting lives over the course of some fifty years started during an early morning text exchange that became so rich and resonant that I asked if Two Coats of Paint could publish an expanded version.

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Sharon Butler: You’ve had three shows together (in two commercial galleries and one university gallery); what’s it like seeing all the work side by side? It must be hard to hang the shows. Do you argue about who gets the more prominent spaces and so forth?

Laurie Fendrich: Hanging a show of any kind well requires a kind detachment from the work I’m not sure either of us feel we’re good at mustering, so we left the hanging to those who know their spaces. In all three instances, the moment I walked in and saw our work hanging together I saw how much we get from one another aesthetically. 

Peter Plagens:  Last question first: We didn’t hang the shows. I like it that way; installations need fresh eyes. Our first one together was with Tim Eaton in West Palm Beach (“West Palm,” the locals say) and it was a two-couples show with Brian O’Doherty and Barbara Novak. The second was at Sonoma State University, and Michael Schwager, the museum director, did a great install. At The Texas Gallery now, Ian Glennie did the install—Laurie on one side of the gallery, moi on the other—and it’s excellent. Seeing our work together mostly makes me see things—color combos, composition (although I’m a centralized guy right now) I might steal. 

SB: What was school like when you were there? Did you go to schools that were hotbeds of abstract painting? Who was on the faculty?

LF: I went to a liberal arts college, where I majored in political philosophy with a concentration on Enlightenment philosophers; I also took drawing and painting courses all four years. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I went for my M.F.A., had a strong Chicago Imagist tradition, and was decidedly not a place where students were into abstraction. At the time, feminism and installation art were at the fore, and I was one of only a small group who made abstract paintings. Critiques there were rigorous but often very harsh, yet at the time I felt I learned from them. My three most influential professors were Ray Yoshida, a Chicago Imagist whose understanding of abstraction ran deep, Richard Loving, and Martin Prekop, all of whom taught me things about abstract painting that are with me to this day.

PP: The University of Southern California, which I attended from 1958-62, had a Department of Fine Arts woefully subservient to the architecture department in its School of Fine Arts and Architecture. My painting professors were Edgar Ewing, Keith Crown, and James Jarvaise. Ewing had won the top fellowship at the Art Institute of Chicago, Crown was lesser-known but did great abstract watercolors, and Jarvaise was in Dorothy Miller’s famous 1959 “16 Americans” MoMA show (with Jasper Johns, Franks Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Nevelson, and Robert Rauschenberg).

SB: I’m curious about how you each came to make your first abstract paintings? What did they look like?

LF: I painted my first abstract paintings at the end of my junior year in college. They emerged out of my obsession with painting large pots that were hanging around the painting studio. I recall painting them with a kind of cubist flattening and ambiguity that I somehow thought was my own discovery. In graduate school, like everyone else, I searched hard to find a way to make something original. I didn’t quite manage to do that, but I discovered oil paint sticks, which I used to inscribe deep lines into a ground of thick paint, pale green paint laid on top of very big canvases. The goopy paint I took from Wayne Thiebaud’s frosting-like paintings, the minimalist lines I took from Robert Motherwell’s Open Series. 

PP: I was a reformed frat boy (although a bit of a wannabe one—pledged when I was a drunk 17-year-old freshman who had to work as a produce man in a Safeway to pay for it) who took “Fundamentals of Drawing and Painting” as an elective. That led to changing my major from English to art, specifically painting. I painted imitation Bay Area figuration to start, then, with a graduate student who’d studied with Hans Hofmann coaching me step-by-step, I painted my first abstraction.

SB: Currently you both have home studios. Have you always painted near one another? Do you have open conversations about one another’s paintings, or do you wait until they are finished?

LF: Now that we are in our golden years, yes, both our studios are in our home, separated only by the living area. Over the years we sometimes painted not only near one another, but in the same studio; this was the case in Los Angeles and then when we first moved from there to New York in 1985. Luckily, we each somehow know when to open our mouths about the other’s work and when to keep quiet. I wouldn’t say Peter and I are roped together like two mountaineers the way Braque said he and Picasso were, but after more than four decades of painting together, sharing our reactions to one another’s paintings and drawings, knowing and respecting our respective artistic sensibilities, continually talking (and arguing) about painting, going to painting exhibitions together, and endlessly probing the meaning of painting, the place of painting in society, and the role of art and artists in society in general, I’m going to settle on calling us “painting partners.” 

PP: Separate studios for much of our time in New York until we moved here about three years ago. We converse all the time about politics, books, art, and the Brit mysteries we watch, but mostly only fleetingly about our own painting—as in, “I like that one on the left best,” or, in answer to a question, “I’d mute the yellow a little,” are about it. 

SB: Are you competitive with one another in terms of either the work itself or the career aspect —reviews, exhibition opportunities, residencies, and so forth? 

LF: I am not competitive with Peter in terms of career, and I’m thrilled for us equally whenever our work gets attention. Because I am continually reading and thinking about the questions of political philosophy, I’ve got more doubts about the worth of art in general—in an ethical “good for society” sense—than he does. As to residencies, we loved being joint fellows at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France (in 2009 and then again in 2017). The experience was superb, and we’ve never wanted to attempt to duplicate it. At this point, we’re happy being home studio rats.

PP: I’m the competitive one, but in my head, and with the art world in general. Right now, the best painting on a wall under this roof is Laurie’s, but I’m plotting my comeback. 

SB: Who is a better painter? 

LF: Ha! This is a rock best left unturned. I’d say we’re neck-and-neck. To get a more nuanced answer you’d have to ply me with a good Sancerre.

PP: See above. 

SB: You self-identify as geezers (75 and 82). Do you still care what’s going on in the art world? When you go to shows are you more interested in seeing work by younger artists or work by your peers and museum retrospectives?

LF: I’m too much in denial to grasp that I’m a senior, but in the raw daylight I get it that I am one. I follow what’s going on in the art world fairly assiduously, but I’ve become way more selective about what I’ll actually go see than I used to be. When I was young[er] it was a point of pride to be like a whale going through plankton and see as many exhibitions as possible before dropping from exhaustion. Now, especially since I come to New York only once every six weeks or so, that approach seems ridiculous. Perhaps it’s just from growing old, but I mostly love just keeping my nose to the grindstone in my own studio.

PP:  Yes. I’m still partly that horrible beast, a critic (self-restricted to reviews of only museum shows published in a general-interest publication, The Wall Street Journal), so I’m vaguely duty-bound to be at least somewhat up on what’s going on. Generally, I’m more interested in younger artists (to me, that’s anybody under 75), but there’s nothing like a museum solo of a great painter. I actually keep a computer image file of works I think I like that I’ve seen online by non-artstar artists, hoping to encounter them in the flesh someday. 

SB: Has your outlook on your own paintings and your ambition changed with age?

LF: No, my ambition as an artist has always been tempered by my reading political philosophy, where questioning the role of art and artists in society yields an odd slant on what it means to be an artist in a mass democracy.

PP: Yes. I’ve slid closer to Popeye’s “I yam what I yam and dat’s all I yam,” which means I don’t worry about how my work fits in—or doesn’t—with what’s going on out there in the—for lack of a better term—art world. But I still want another museum show, maybe even a retrospective. Most of that is selfish ambition, but part of it is that I’ve learned almost everything from other/earlier artists who put their stuff out there in public, so I feel an obligation to do that, too.

SB: Do you take anything from pre-Modernist Western art history, e.g., the Renaissance or Baroque?

LF: Velázquez and Van Eyck are, to my mind, the gods of painting. I love the way being a hardcore painter (using brushes to apply pigment to flat rectangles) makes me feel linked to them, and through them, to the whole long tradition of Western painting that flows back to the cave painters. Yet I take nothing directly from them. On the other hand, though the Sienese painters are lesser gods, I’ve lifted plenty of colors and shapes directly from their paintings. Overall, my sources are so eclectic that though I know they range from comics to Leonardo, it’s hard for me to pinpoint them.  

PP: I had a one-two crucial, formative experience vis-à-vis art history. The first part was taking a class, when I was an undergraduate, in Northern Renaissance art and being knocked on my ass by the Flems—van Eyck up to maybe Joachim Patinir. The second was getting a grant when I was still in my twenties to go live in Belgium to look at the stuff. Today, when I go to any encyclopedic art museum, I head straight for the Flems. The Northern Renaissance painters are, in their imperfect perspective and (sometimes) intense color, more modern than the Italians. 

SB: What is the future for painting?

LF: I am a bit of a Cassandra, which makes any vatic comments I make about the future of painting fairly worthless. But here goes: I believe the sensitive, earnest, and empathic type of human being that’s required to make, see, and fall in love with the kind of paintings I love is rapidly disappearing. Although painting will continue (it’s too much fun to paint for it ever to die out), I give the kind of painting I’m talking about only another twenty-five years.

PP: I could be a smart-ass and say cloisonné—i.e., an art form that takes skill and talent and that’s still practiced but is irrelevant. One the other hand there’s the idea—I think Malcolm Gladwell said it in The New Yorker—that if something extant has been around a long time it’s probably going to be around for some time longer. So…painting will be around in a big way quantitatively, i.e., a lot of people doing it, but with diminished clout in the art world. That is, however, tempered by the fact that the art world ain’t so White anymore and that a lot of Black (and Brown) artists want, and are deservedly getting, their shot at gallery and museum attention to their painting. That’s as it should be, but a lot of that painting is, for obvious reasons, figurative if not outright narrative, and I’m more interested in abstract painting.

SB: Both of you are artists who write about art. Any thoughts about other artists who both write and make art?

LF: I started writing about art for The Chronicle Review at The Chronicle of Higher Education about twenty-five years ago, when I was still a professor. Because their readers are a highly educated audience that knows little about art, I was writing for intelligent generalists, not art world people. At Two Coats of Paint I feel I now get to write for an intelligent art world audience, but please kill me on the spot if I ever slip and use art-smack words.

PP: There’s writing about art and there’s writing about art. Diaries, chapbooks, poetry, philosophical essays, and appreciations (please don’t say “puff pieces”) of other artists are one thing. (All visual artists still live in a society of words and a lot of ’em need an outlet or two in words, published or not.) On the other hand, there’s art criticism of the non-fawning review kind. I’ve done that, which doesn’t get you any friends, especially among artists you haven’t equated with the greats. Fortunately, I’m done with reviews of gallery shows and review only museum exhibitions. Still I’m more negative (or at least think I am) than most critics, which means I’ve probably blown my chances of a retro at more than a few museums.

SB: Good to know! And this leads us to the whole conversation about negative reviews. There is so much to consider when artists write about other artists’ work — especially now with social media. Maybe we should pick this conversation up another time. Thanks Laurie and Peter for answering my long list of questions.

“Laurie Fendrich & Peter Plagens, New Work“, Texas Gallery, 2012 Peden Street, Houston, TX, 77019
Through Nov 11 – Dec 16.

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