THE Magazine - Los Angeles

The prolific Hans Burkhardt (1904-94) joined the Cal State Northridge faculty in the 1960s and maintained a close relationship with the University throughout the rest of his life. The retrospective at the CSUN Gallery included paintings, drawings, and prints selected from the generous donation of nearly one thousand works the artist made to the University Collection. The exhibit thus provides a wide breadth of the artist's oeuvre; ranging from his early works done in New York in the 1930s to paintings inspired by his extended travels in Mexico in the '50s and '60s to powerful images protesting the destruction of war, which he produced throughout his career.

Switzerland-native Burkhardt immigrated to New York in 1924, where he befriended and worked with seminal artists such as Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. Before moving to Los Angeles in 1937, he had mastered geometric abstraction and expressionism. He worked through cubism and surrealism and arrived at an early form of abstract expressionism, later employing these modernist modes to communicate the full spectrum of human experience, including spirituality, hope, anguish, and joy.

One of the most powerful and horrifying images of war in the CSUN Collection, Moon Over Battlefield (1941), depicts a menacing jaw, blood red paint dripping over its teeth, ravaging a dark, desolate landscape. Small crucifixes emerge from a mound, while an orange-red moon soaks up the noxious color of bloodshed. Burkhardt's thick black paint with touches of red creates a vision of the darkness of death mixed with the vibrant color of life. By contrast, Tropical Landscape (1955-56) reflects the artist's stay in Mexico and evokes the warm colors of a lush, sunlit terrain. Structured architectural brushstrokes collide with organic, biomorphic forms emerging from a textured painterly background. In works like these, Burkhardt achieved a perfect balance between structure and spontaneity, which was to become characteristic of his work.

In conjunction with the exhibition at CSUN, Jack Rutberg Fine Arts focuses on Burkhardt's paintings from the 1960s, providing an in-depth look into the artist's oeuvre from that politically charged decade. Although there are remarkably powerful war paintings in the exhibit, they hang among images of hope and spirituality, displaying a wide range of Burkhardt's expression.

The earliest works from the 1960s reflect his time in Mexico and his spiritual connection with the people, their beliefs, and way of life. There Burkhardt learned to see death as a "journey to a better world," revealed in a series of works entitled Journey into the Unknown. Images of pallbearers took the form of vertical structures spanned by a horizontal coffin or corpse. During his stay in San Miguel de Allende, moved by the ringing of the church bells marking religious processions and the passing of the day, Burkhardt created lyrical paintings and gave them titles such as Sounds of San Miguel, Evening Sounds, and Silent Sounds.

My Lai (1968) and Lang Vei (1967-68) are two monumental paintings, incorporating actual skulls, inspired by the carnage of the Vietnam War. Considered to be one of the greatest war paintings of the twentieth century, My Lai transcends any particular war, nation, or point of view. A somber gray palette, punctuated by black vertical and horizontal brushstrokes, creates the backdrop for a litter of human crania, which project from the planar surface of the painting. Burkhardt's representation of war, death, and destruction resonates tragedy on a universal level.

As he is one of the most respected and revered painters in America, it comes as no surprise to find Jerome Witkin no less masterful with a pen or pencil than with a brush. Indeed, his innovative and yet rock-solid draftsmanship lays the foundation of his art's magic power.

Witkin's figures and landscapes are the very opposite of abstraction: buildings and bodies, streets and faces, postures and events are made equivalent and narrative through the alchemy of his energetic, heavily worked lines and emotive, gestural approach to portraiture and representation. He takes the mechanics of sight into account in his fusing of multiple perspectives into coherent images, images that contain the skeletons and bruises of their own development. Like Yeats's dancers and the dance, Witkin's seeing and his drawing are single acts. Though a wizard with color when he paints, the black and white of his drawings add a level of gritty poetry to his portrayals, much as in a Victor Hugo novel, and infuse the frank portrayal of human and architectural decay with a warmth bordering on romanticism but free of sentimentality.

Witkin's embrace of ruination, aged skin, scuffed furniture, and rutted pavement reveals his preference for the sublime and haunting over the picturesque. His drawings function as catalytic conversions of such events and encounters from four to two dimensions. Evocative and intuitive as well as descriptive, they portray not merely what was seen but what it was like to see it.