Joseph Fiore: Painter/Teacher.

Thompson, James

Joseph Fiore: Painter/Teacher

Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center

Asheville, North Carolina

December 9, 2005-April 8, 2006

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Joseph Fiore: Painter/Teacher is the most recent in a series of enlightening exhibitions held on the premises of the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center (BMCM+AC) in downtown Asheville, North Carolina. The BMCM+AC was established in 1993 to preserve the legacy and continue the spirit of innovation and creativity of Black Mountain College, an institution that lasted little more than two decades (1933-1956) but was widely influential. During the early days of its organization, the BMCM+AC initiated a varied series of short monographs called "dossiers" on different Black Mountain College (BMC) students and teachers. (1) The first of these publications was devoted to the career and work of Joseph Fiore, a twelve-year "Black Mountaineer," first as student and then as teacher. Over ten years later, it is fitting to reconsider Fiore's art in the context of works done by his students during his teaching years at BMC.

If it has become a cliche to define modernist abstraction as aspiring, in Walter Pater's famous words, "to the condition of music," such a connection is crucial in the life and work of Joseph Fiore. Fiore's father was a violinist and founding member of the Cleveland Symphony, and Joseph's family was full of musicians. After an abortive attempt to follow his father in the violin, Fiore learned piano, and he has continued to play classical music on an old upright in his New York studio. Robert Godfrey, an Asheville painter who studied with Fiore in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s, found another important musical link between his teacher's interest in jazz and "that sort of reverberation, that sort of improvisation," (2) which can be seen in his painted work.

The hanging of the exhibition, skillfully orchestrated by BMCM+AC Program Curator Alice Sebrell and Asheville artist Noah Satterstrom, juxtaposes and alternates works by Fiore with those of his students. An early pair places an untitled oil-on-paper by Fiore below Transformation, done in casein on paper by Don Alter. Both works include biomorphic forms whose origins are likely located in European Surrealism, notably Paul Klee. Alter's small busy picture teems with forms suggesting microorganisms. Fiore's calmer work includes three amoeba-like blobs that are more loosely structured, with staccato black lines and wraith-like antennae articulating their deep sea riches of green, blue, and gold.

The exhibition commences with Fiore's Untitled (1955) mixed media on board, one of the most densely cumulative images in the exhibition. Fiore has always had a gift for collage; here he mixes and overlays not only color polygons, but also tissue paper textures. These build up an active foreground that settles beneath a suggestive backdrop of somber gray, speckled with a modicum of dark dots. Fiore's work, even at its most abstract, retains a connection with the landscape.

Frank Hursch's arrival at Black Mountain was marked by an almost instant introduction to Fiore's paintings via a display of his work on campus. Hursch's avid viewings of the exhibition led him to conclude emphatically that he had enrolled "in the right place." One of Hursch's own works in ink and wash suggests an initiation into Cubism, while his Glue Drawing, with its pale gray relief emerging as a negative ghostly tangle, has moved forward into an awareness of De Kooning, who also affected Fiore's work. Another noteworthy Fiore composition is his Orange Field I (1954). As the title declares, the picture is dominated by pale and dark orange tones. The finely judged balance of his painting arrests shadows of green descending from the top like spilt fruit.

In notable contrast to Fiore's controlled mastery is the joint festive effort of four of his most inventive pupils and peers. Untitled Collaboration (1955) offers a disparate mix of Black Mountain students: renowned sculptor John Chamberlain, artist/writer Fielding Dawson, Jorge Fick, and Dan Rice. The graphic rhythms of the artists' half-hidden signatures subtly embroider the carnival colors and flamboyant dripping brushwork that celebrate this composition's heterodox identity, careening like Rimbaud's drunken boat, like an exploding carnival float. It is an emblematic BMC document of shared process, the painterly equivalent of Exquisite Corpse.

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Fielding "Fee" Dawson's most notable contribution to the exhibition comes as a loan from Jargon Publisher and BMC man of letters Jonathan Williams. Dawson was a student in Fiore's drawing classes, whose beneficent effects he acknowledged. With broad circular strokes of black ink on collaged brown cardboard, Dawson powerfully invoked the signature visage of the college's last years: the owlish eyes and walrus moustache of mighty Charles Olson. Fiore did not idolize Olson the way Dawson did, but he had occasion to work closely with him and was receptive to and stimulated by his wonderful range of mind. The dark calligraphy of Dawson's portrait echoes the famous brushwork of another of his deep enthusiasms, the abstract painter Franz Kline.

Dan Rice shared Fiore's love of jazz, performing as a trumpet player with the great Big Bands of Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Tommy Dorsey, and Benny Goodman. In fact Fiore persuaded Rice to change his primary allegiance to painting and drawing (jazz saxophonist Larry Rivers made a similar move). Rice's Untitled (1961) suggests a bird's-eye compositional view, with convergent rows of frosty white, tilled in the middle to expose painterly slices of pink. The subtle brushstrokes echo earlier works by Fiore such as The Harbor (no. 22 in his 1995 exhibition) or the final work in this show, Moving Waters (1956), where no title is needed to indicate the aquatic inspiration behind Fiore's flickering vertical and horizontal strokes of pale and dark blue, with added gold and green patches. There is a faint perceptual parallel to the staccato abstract rhythms of deconstructed trees found in Mondrian's compositional ovals.

Frank Hursch's Untitled (1949) demonstrates an interest in the technical structure of cubism far more extensive than Fiore's informal comprehension of its way of seeing. Hursch's detailed drawing follows specific components, while Fiore's Untitled (1950) adds not just color--a sheen of teardrop shapes in velvety blues and reds--but a dash of European Surrealism, or at least the sort of version of it practiced by De Kooning.

The grandest of Fiore works in the exhibition, #7-54: A Gathering (1954), faces the viewer who enters the exhibition or peeks in the principal gallery window. Its happy life among like-minded art ended with the show; an astute collector snapped it up on opening night. The Gathering features an unexpected range of tones--from black to white--as well as of color, from blue to orange. It is Fiore demonstrating his mastery of the mechanics of modernist abstraction, on a scale that begins to be imposing, and it might have blown everything else out of the room, were it not for the even larger, vertical, wryly-titled Figure Column, by Dorothea Rockburne. Like other former students in the show, Rockburne offers a tip of the hat to Maestro Fiore, but pauses only a brief moment before moving on. Her liquid strokes, applied with confidence and urgency, point to an even broader ambition, a further development. Thus is Fiore able to twice triumph as a gifted teacher, to enjoy not only the successful accomplishment of his own work, but also to observe the successful launch of a former student's new and different voyage.

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If Rockburne was one of Fiore's most original students, there can be little doubt who was his all-time favorite pupil. One need only pause briefly before the blown up photograph in the BMCM+AC storefront window--a couple perched on a coupe--to grasp the held hands that confirm the bonds of affection that continue to unite Joseph and Mary Fitton Fiore. One need simply consider the no-nonsense perception of her Tools ink drawing in this exhibition. She outlines a descending cascade of two hammers, a spigot, and two bolted metal strips, deftly demonstrating that as a draftsperson, she had a skilful and distinctive touch. Her future husband would have had no more need to cut her special slack than did Olson in his literature classes, where le Grand Charles adjudged her mental toughness sufficient to rank her "one of the boys," a perceptive student indeed.

James Thompson

Western Carolina University

(1.) The dossiers have continued. The most recent, (No. 8) is on Parisian artist Gregory Masurovsky, with a series of texts by eminent French writer Michel Butor.

(2.) Quoted in "Preserving a unique legacy" by Arnold Wengrow, Asheville Citizen-Times, (December 18, 2005): Arts E9.