Passage/Memory/Landscape:
The Paintings of Michael Mazur

By Valerie C. Doran

`Mind Landscape After Chao Meng-fu', 1994 Oil on canvas Height 213 cm, width 183 cm

Michael Mazur was lying prone and fully conscious on a hospital operating table, staring at a monitor showing a black-and-white picture of the inside of his heart. The image appeared to him as a composition, a wintry landscape of spare, overlapping strokes that were his arteries, sketching forms at once minimalistic and natural. It was, he says, `a vision of my heart abstracted, translated into a Chinese painting'. (All quotes are from conversations with the author unless otherwise noted.) Mazur's insight into this most interior of natural landscapes, and its association in his mind with Chinese painting, became a catalyst of both coalescence and transition in his life as an artist. Ultimately, it inspired in him the search for a new language of painting, based on an inventive codification of brushwork and natural forms from which he would construct his own envisioned landscapes. In January 2002, nearly a decade after that revealing heart procedure in a Boston hospital, a group of Mazur's luminous, abstracted landscapes were featured in the exhibition `Looking East' at the Boston University Art Gallery (Fig. 1). Curated by gallery director John Stomberg, the exhibition of paintings by three major American artists (the other two were Brice Marden and Pat Steir), was meant to reflect a revitalization or transformation in the artists' body of work inspired in some way by an engagement with Asian art, particularly Chinese painting and calligraphy. The selected works of these three stylistically very different but generationally contemporary artists eloquently demonstrated the range of possibility for what Stomberg terms `a true hybridity' for painting in a global art culture (see `Re-Orienting Modernism: Brice Marden, Michael Mazur, Pat Steir', in John Stomberg, Looking East: Brice Marden, Michael Mazur, Pat Steir, Boston, 2002, pp. 3-74). Here the referencing, deconstruction and assimilation of elements of Chinese art moved beyond ironical pastiche or mere cultural cross-dressing to find a locus of significance within the context of the artists' already well-established personal art histories. Marden wove the threads of his specific interest in the formal structures of Chinese calligraphy into the sinuous forms of his minimalist canvases, while Steir's monumental splashed-paint canvases showed the dramatic impact that a fascination with the controlled spontaneity of Chinese and Japanese Zen calligraphers has had on an artist famous for her earlier experiments in the language of postmodern appropriation. In Mazur's expressive and visually complex paintings there was evidence of yet another dimension of engagement. Works of the last decade such as Mind Landscapes after Chao Meng-fu (1993-96), Climbing in Mountains (1997-98) and the monumental triptych Fall Mountains for Kuo Hsi (2001) are layered surfaces of uniquely codified colour, brushstroke and form that, while innately abstract, create intricate visual narratives of movement through a landscape both imagined and referential. Looking at these works from the other side of the mirror - that is, from the perspective of Chinese art rather than modern American art - there is discernible a level of interplay with conceptual and perceptual elements of Chinese aesthetics that is more intuitive than intentional, carrying Mazur's mark-making beyond even hybridity and into dialogue. Any strong work of art asks questions as much as it makes statements, it is of compelling interest that in Mazur's works the questions asked are evocative of those inherent in the explorations of some contemporary Chinese artists. One thinks of the varied, layered, contrapuntal surfaces in the recent mountain-and-water paintings of Wucius Wong, for example; or even of the word-image landscapes of Xu Bing. These artists are of course approaching their variations and deconstructions of the language of Chinese art from within, from a point of interface between the tradition and their own contemporary concerns. As an American artist, Mazur's encounters with Chinese art over the last fifteen years have been serendipitous points on a journey, both inspiring a direction and illuminating a sensibility already nascent in his work. Yet in Mazur's case as well as that of artists as diverse as Wong and Xu, an end result of the process has been essentially the same: an interface with traditional Chinese art that is in some ways mutually illuminative. Mazur himself emphasizes that his works are `modernist spaces, not Chinese ones', and that his direct antecedents are Degas and De Kooning, not Ni Zan or Zhao Mengfu; but all of these artists enter into the blueprint of Mazur's development. Born in New York City in 1935, Mazur graduated in 1961 from Yale University with a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and printmaking. The early 1960s was a period when many younger American artists were turning away from Abstract Expressionism towards a reinterpretation of figuration and realism, and at Yale Mazur was strongly influenced by his teachers, the artist-printmaker Gabor Peterdi and the painter Rico Lebrun. Uninspired by the more extreme edge of the realist trend represented by the Pop Art movement, Mazur focused his attention on the expressive qualities of the figural and, increasingly, on both the expressive and abstract qualities of landscape. Drawings, paintings and prints of this early period demonstrate Mazur's strong interest in nature, in particular a large body of work executed during stays at his wife's family retreat on Cape Cod. Many of these images focus on one view, of three small, tree-dotted island formations in the centre of Wakeby Lake near the artist's cottage. In these early, prescient works, formal elements such as the soft, ambiguous island forms, the distinctive layered articulations of trees and the abstract quality of the richly textured surfaces can be seen as part of a subliminal code that re-emerged in the wake of Mazur's later encounters with Chinese art (Fig. 2). Moving in 1961 from New York to New England, where he taught at both the Rhode Island School of Design and Brandeis University, Mazur became strongly involved in the development and propagation of the art of the print. By the early 1990s he had already made an indelible mark on the art world through the expressive brilliance and technical virtuosity achieved in his experiments with monotype, a unique `hybrid' print created by painting on the surface of an unworked printing plate and then transferring the image onto paper or fabric. Described as a virtuoso medium that encourages speed and gestural freedom (Clifford S. Ackley, `Mazur's Monotypes: The Medium with a Memory', in Trudy V. Hansen, ed., The Prints of Michael Mazur, with a Catalogue Raisonne 1956-1999, New York, 2000, p. 79), in Mazur's hands the monotype became a tool for seeking an equilibrium between the expressiveness of the surface and the image. Many of Mazur's most compelling works in the monotype medium deal with subjects from nature - flowers, animals, landscapes. Interestingly, some of the most representational of these works, such as Monkey at a Window (1974), are particularly marked by an integral expressiveness of surface (Fig. 3). There is in these works both a symbiosis and a duality of subject, medium and gesture that allows the surface to become doubly vital - the "energy matter" from which the image is formed and out of which its subject is palpably drawn. This effect is enhanced by Mazur's layering of the monotype surface through the use of `ghosts', or second pulls from the painted plate; a technique which also creates an effect of what the artist calls `passages', details that move the eye through the surface of the work in an intricate, ineffable narrative. The subtext in discussing this earlier work is its nascent relationship to fundamental aspects of Chinese literati painting and aesthetics. Mazur's intense focus on surface itself as perceptum finds a parallel in the centrality to Chinese calligraphy and painting of the brushstroke as the ultimate expressive surface, containing within it many levels of mark-making. The single brushstroke can be read as an entire visual environment, containing tension, rhythm, texture, tonality, emotion and spirit-resonance (qiyun). Thus in a Chinese landscape painting, for example, Mazur's idea of `passages' also exists on two levels: in the pure expressionism of the brushwork surface and in the compositional narrative of the image. (It can be noted here that this is related to but not quite the same as the similarities between the subjective expressionism of Chinese brush painting and early Modernism recognized by reformist Chinese painters of the 1920s and '30s). Interestingly, the relevance of aspects of Chinese aesthetics for the development of his own art did not become an issue for Mazur until the mid-1980s, which he describes as a difficult period in his creative life; yet he had a long-standing acquaintanceship with Chinese art by virtue of the collection of his uncle, Harold Isaacs, a journalist who had been stationed in China in the 1930s and in 1938 authored the Marxist-based political analysis The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. (A rubbing from the Han period Wu Liang shrine that was a gift to Isaacs from Song Qingling, widow of Sun Yat-sen, now hangs on a wall in Mazur's house in Cambridge, Massachusetts). Additionally, while at Yale, Mazur had studied with the Asian art historian Nelson Wu, and after moving to New England had easy access to the fine collection of Chinese art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Yet by his own account his deeper attention was only aroused when he developed a fascination for Chinese scholar's gardens after reading an extensively illustrated book on the subject by Maggie Keswick (The Chinese Garden: History, Art and Architecture, Academy Editions [UK], 1986; a publication which it must be said has inspired interest in a surprising number of contemporary American artists). In 1987 Mazur travelled to China with his wife, the poet Gail Mazur, and a group of Boston-area artists to visit the classical scholar's gardens of Suzhou (their number included Richard Rosenblum, later to emerge as a major collector of Chinese scholar's rocks). Mazur describes himself as both impressed and at home with the aesthetics of the gardens: `I loved how abstract and complex the gardens were, how loaded, how maximal rather than minimal. I loved how the layering of components in the garden rockery and the paths meant that you could walk through a space several different ways and never see the same thing twice in the same way. This related to my idea of "passages" in a work: possibilities of movement that slow it down to a walk, getting your eye used to moving through the surface from detail to detail, pausing and turning, then moving again, travelling through rather than just over. The Chinese gardens made clearer to me why layering interests me so much, and open and closed spaces. They led me to paintings that grew out of that kind of garden rockery complexity without having any particular relationship to specific locations or spaces.' Returning from China, Mazur experimented with imagery and methods inspired by his experiences there. In his prints and paintings he worked with the sequencing of images as a means of communicating the idea of a layered passage through space and time, and also created prints and paintings on silk (Fig. 4). But a growing sense that an imminent breakthrough in his work was eluding him was exacerbated by deteriorating health, and in 1993 Mazur found himself on that hospital bed undergoing an angioplasty and seeing visions. As soon as he could, he returned to the studio and began to articulate a new sense of direction, starting with a full-frontal commitment to painting. A meticulous draughtsman who usually produced multiple drawings before creating a final image, Mazur now began to paint more intuitively, from the empty canvas. His first works, which he called Branchings, were directly inspired by the imagery he had seen on the heart monitor, but were now allowed to develop organically: `The Branching series was about teaching myself to paint in a new way, letting the gestures move along the page, as a tree limb would move,' says Mazur. `I think of it now as a kind of invented calligraphy with a life of its own, leading somewhere that I couldn't predict'. Gradually Mazur began to add other forms, especially rounded, organic shapes evocative of the island, trees and flower imagery that had appeared in early works like the Wakeby drawings and in his later monotypes of the 1980s. Mazur's keen awareness of the surface, and of the relationship between gesture and form honed in his work with monotypes, became of increasing importance, and Mazur states that these shapes based in nature came to `represent another kind of brushstroke.' In 1994, one more encounter with an abstracted, reproduced inner landscape had a profound impact on the new direction Mazur's work was taking. In a local Cambridge bookshop Mazur had come across a book with an image on its cover that astonished him: a brush painting of a mysterious grove of highly stylized pine trees formed of organic, `puffy' shapes, and rendered in glowing tonalities of ink and mineral green against an umber background. Mazur was actually looking at a detail of the scroll painting The Mind Landscape of Hsieh Yu-yu [Xie Youyu] by the Yuan dynasty artist Zhao Mengfu [Chao Meng-fu] (1254-1322), used as the cover of an exhibition catalogue of Chinese painting (Wen Fong, ed., Images of the Mind, Princeton, 1984). The image reverberated for Mazur in a way that revealed new possibilities not only in looking forward but also in looking back. Mazur came to recognize a relationship between the loose, rounded marks he had been making on his canvases and the kind of gesture he had been using to create flower and tree images in his past work. Understanding that the forms of Zhao's trees were developed from the literati artist's codification of and reverence for nature, translated into gesture and brushstroke, Mazur saw that his articulation of natural form could `loosen up' and have its own qualities as invented or imagined landscape. Most particularly, in the Zhao detail what Mazur saw in his mind was `the code for a form that could operate on many levels, as a kind of blossoming out; as cloud, as tree, as bud.' Mazur was also attracted to the palette of the scroll detail - the rich mineral green washes and the glowing umber of the silk background, their depth of colour exaggerated by the printing process. Inspired by the Zhao painting, Mazur created the series Mind Landscapes After Chao Meng-fu, deconstructing the forms, colours and even the atmosphere of the Zhao detail and assimilating them into subtly layered `mind landscapes', elegant dioramas composed of thin veils of texture, line and form that reference both Zhao and Mazur himself (Fig. 5). (When Mazur finally saw the original scroll at the Princeton Art Museum in 1995, he was amazed by its small size and its delicacy. He states that he hadn't wanted to see the scroll until he had worked through the series, because `as long as I wasn't connected to it directly I had permission to do anything I wanted.'). In later paintings such as the recent Fall Mountains for Kuo Hsi, Mazur's referencing of a Chinese work, in this case the eleventh century masterpiece Early Spring by Guo Xi (1020-90), is at once more direct and more remote (Fig. 6). The structure of Mazur's painting intentionally echoes the massed forms and endless passageways of the original, but the aesthetic is transposed into illuminated tonal patches and strokes of colour - greens, fuschias, yellows - that create a surface full of movement, of visual point and counterpoint, that speaks to another kind of seeing. In his current works-in-progress, which include both paintings and prints, Mazur has begun simplifying his compositions while exploring an interest in more complex textures and further distilling his coded forms and palette. A series of large canvases shows ambiguous, rock-like forms articulated through glistening strokes of light pinks, blues, yellows and greys, balanced by vibrant swatches of darker tones, and emerging from swirls of ground or space (Fig. 7). Mazur describes these works as playing with the idea of scale, wherein the forms could be `rocks or islands or continents' and the space around them `a pool, an ocean or the universe'. It seems that whatever new passage Mazur's work is taking, the Chinese garden is still with him.