2023Dieter Buchhart

For this world in its present form is passing away.

—1 Corinthians 7:31

 

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thought.

—Marcus Aurelius

 

The art of the future (which will disappear, like everything else!): Imitate nature closely; above all, imitate nature’s way of creating!

—August Strindberg

 

“Major ingredient of successful art: permanent surprise,” Clement Greenberg noted in 1963, thus describing how new experiences with art can expand our openness and estimation of what is possible in art. And it is this “permanent surprise” that runs throughout the entire oeuvre of the artist Peter Bradley. The famous American art critic and essayist Greenberg highly admired Bradley, whom he met in April 1968 at the latest. Both refer to regular contact and exchange until January 1974. Like Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, or Jules Olitski, in the early 1970s Bradley worked in the spirit of Post-Painterly Abstraction, exploring the “possibilities of color,” “for which there [were] no precedents in Western tradition.” Bradley’s abstract works found recognition in numerous exhibitions, including his first solo exhibition in 1972 at the renowned André Emmerich Gallery—which specialized in Color Field painting—and in 1973 at the Whitney Biennial. During the shortest period of time, his works made their way into the collections of the most important museums of the United States, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts and the Menil Collection in Houston. At his studio at 654 Broadway he was a neighbor of Joel Shapiro and Kenneth Noland, with whom he maintained a regular exchange. Beside artists like Frank Bowling, Sam Gilliam, Vivian Browne, and Jack Whitten, Bradley was among those promoted by Robert M. Doty, a curator at the Whitney. And yet he refused to take part in Doty’s 1971 exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America. Instead, with the help of philanthropist and art collector John de Menil, Bradley realized his own exhibition on the subject of color and abstraction that same year. At the show held at the DeLUXE Theater, a former cinema in Houston, Bradley presented the “openness” and “freedom” of abstract works in the sense of his own oeuvre and received “rave reviews.” As Steve Cannon wrote in the catalogue: “A couple of artists, Kenneth Noland and Sam Gilliam came to town to help hang the show. Clement Greenberg dropped in to say hello.” Greenberg also praised Bradley’s important role as the curator of the exhibition: “Peter Bradley chose the show, within the limits set him by material circumstance, as well as he knew how. No concessions were made … The black artists included were there on the same basis of quality or ambition as the white ones. I can’t praise the De Luxe show enough on these scores. It sets a unique example, and one that I hope will be much imitated from now on.” In a thorough analysis of the exhibition in his book 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, Darby English notes that “the location of the De Luxe Show intensified the resistant force of color painting by localizing it.” It becomes clear that those involved were aware of the specialness and importance of the exhibition when Cannon writes: “About the show, Kenneth Noland had commented, ‘it was an experience.’ And Peter Bradley had added: ‘We did it. It’s out front now. There for everyone to see.’ It was more than great fun. It was a blast. And a good time was had by all. Even the critics. Dynamite!” The explosive character of the exhibition, coupled with the idea of “permanent surprise,” is what Bradley summed up with the term “hard art.” “Bumper stickers on the blue background, print in black and white, flashed: Hard Art at the De Luxe Show. ‘And why,’ had asked one of the reporters, ‘Mister Bradley, do you call it hard art?’ Because it’s hard to get to. Hard on the eyes, and you gotta look at it a long time before you know what’s happening. That’s why it’s hard.” The De Luxe Show thus reflects Bradley’s artistic credo: permanent surprise, resistance, inclusivity, limitless openness, and freedom.

But what took place between Bradley’s third solo show at the André Emmerich Gallery in 1974 and his next solo presentation, which wasn’t held until 2021, almost half a century later, at Karma on New York’s Lower East Side? What sets Bradley’s color paintings apart from those of his contemporaries in the early 1970s and makes them so unique? What artistic development did Bradley undergo in subsequent decades and why do the terms “dynamite” and “explosion” define his current works so aptly on several different levels? I will explore these questions in the following, beginning with his gaze toward the macrocosm, our world and outer space, moving to the human perspective of the mesocosm, and then to the microcosm as the concealed.

MACROCOSM

Bradley was fascinated by the gaze into outer space and from outer space back to Earth, a highly topical subject at the end of the 1960s, as he himself noted: “The spaceship, the moon landing, all these space movies coming up, sci-fi, space, the possibility of life was there all the time. I am just waiting for that someone comes from outer space who looks like me.” And it is this very gaze into the expanses of outer space and back to our world that seems to define the texture of Bradley’s works in the early 1970s. The term texture is derived from the Latin word textura for fabric and can be defined as the inner structure and composition of a flat or surface material. In computer graphics as well, texture is the surface structure of a graphically represented object, the “covering” of 3D models. This seems all the more interesting today since the surface structure of a painting can now be reproduced using 3D printing. For example, the start-up company General Public with its three-dimensional photography technique Synograph™ makes copies of paintings that, like casts of sculptures, are advertised as equivalent to the original: “Capturing the nuances of brushwork and technique, these textured prints are an authentic expression of the artist’s hand … our textured prints are nearly identical to the original with all the texture and articulation created by the artist.” The decisive thing here is that the advertising message pays homage to a transference of the bodily presence of the artist in his tache and his brushstroke beyond the final product’s actual motif, reflecting an appreciation of it. The texture’s objecthood and its adherence to the object is declared a foundational aspect of artistic expression and recalls the fierce nineteenth-century dispute over visual illusion versus texture. Analogously, Bradley’s works from the 1970s are defined by an engagement with the surface, the texture, and the objecthood of the paintings based on this in a search to capture an image of the macrocosm. In this way, the title Nix Olympia (cat. 1) refers to the highest elevation in the solar system, a massive mountain on Mars three times as high as Mount Everest. The paint application is pastose, whereby the basic structure is defined by orange, light blue, and wine-red patterns that are poured and splashed across the canvas, sometimes in contrary directions. The upper layer of paint, due to the mingling of dark and light shades, forms a marble-like pattern that evokes cloud formations, while fissures in the gel-like paint generate a crusty surface structure. Bradley here evokes notions of the cosmos, the macrocosm, both a gaze into the endless universe as well as what looks like the surface of the planet of Mars, even though that surface is actually only reproducible with today’s methods of representation (fig. 1). This is also true in Starmaker (cat. 2), where Bradley seems to generate the light that wanders through the galaxies for millennia, only reaching our telescope eyes when the star in question has long since extinguished (figs. 7, 8). It is a vision before vision that Bradley seems to capture in his works, but one that bases each visible color, each color nuance, on a certain wavelength of reflected light. For color is light, is based on light energy, or “ruling light,” as the title of a 1973 painting makes clear (Ruling Light, cat. 3). And light is color and is based on color material, as is shown by the range of color in Bradley’s early paintings, where the paint is applied with mechanical spray guns. Bradley saw the “unknown, the mystery. [The surface of a painting] deals with an unknown feeling and a feeling of the unknown; something I’ve never seen before. Using brushes I was always exactly certain of the way it would look. But I don’t mean to say the spray gun is my final step.” He sought to generate the cosmically ungraspable with the technically unpredictable. The mechanical device for applying paint helped Bradley overcome the classical tools of the painter, replacing the hand of the artist with a painting instrument freed of his own physical body. Bradley would never again use a brush in his painting as an expression of traditional art history. Instead, over the decades, he would adapt methods that transformed the hand of the artist into something more like a distant conductor’s baton, requiring no direct contact with the visual support using a brush, palette knife, pen, or pencil. To this extent, Bradley placed himself in the tradition of Minimal Art, which questioned the artist genius and the hand of the artist. In his use of the spray gun, influenced by Jules Olitski, he was motivated by both the refusal of control over the artistic result and the search for a technique to accelerate the creative artistic process: “I kept thinking of a way to apply the paint faster in order to see more color each time I painted. Also, I saw what Olitski had done with spraying. I couldn’t do it by hand, it just wasn’t fast enough. I had to turn to a mechanical device, a spray gun. The real reason I turned to the spray gun was because it’s the only way to put the paint on fast.” In this way, Bradley’s production of layers of paint is characterized by speed, the mechanical application of paint, and the textural structure taking on a life of its own, in principle comparable to today’s 3D printing. He created “structural color situations” that, in works like Hemming (fig. 2) or Starmaker, evoke the macrocosm and the incomprehensible, the infinite, using ranges of color, while Nix Olympia already seemed to capture the surface of a distant planet that was only to a certain extent representable in the early 1970s (compare it to an image from today, fig. 3). Similarly, in Salmon Spray (fig. 4), a form surfaces from the pink mists of paint like a mountain massif that cannot be placed, or, in Supersqualo No. 1 (cat. 4), an undefined beige form applied with the paint roller emerges in the orange-red spray of the paint droplets. Although the title refers to a Ferrari model from 1955, the orange-red explosion of color seems more like lava erupting from a volcano. What on first glance appears uniform and might seem similar is shaped by the differentiation that reflects the macrocosm and its infinitude of possibilities. Nothing is like anything else, whether the exploding veil over a web of color in Chinese Snowball II (probably created with a broom) or the red-hot cosmic storm in Supersqualo No. 1. Bradley often unexpectedly turns his telescope around from extroversion to introspection, the gaze toward outer space is directed toward our planet and ultimately ourselves. The pastose paint layers of Circle of Fifths (cat. 5)—the title is a term from music theory, comparable to the color wheel, that refers to the circle that depicts the proximity and distance of the various keys—are constructed of grass green, pink, violet, yellow, and blue paints that were poured on the canvas and mixed in various states of drying and bled into one another, resulting in dendrite-like structures (cat. 5, detail), islands of paint, and fissures that evoke a cartographic view of the earth’s surface. But fundamentally, the macrocosm, the gaze onto the endless expanses of the universe and the view from outer space to Earth, is generated as a visual effect resulting from the physical surface and texture of Bradley’s paintings.

Bradley modeled and structured the surface of Tharsis Ridge (cat. 6)—the title referring to the largest volcanic landscape on Mars—from a pastose layer of gel using a rake and covered it with various fusing and oscillating shades of beige, yellow, and light pink with the help of a spray gun. Still during the drying process, he transferred violet and brown layers of paint from another painting using a counterproof technique, while yellow-green drops of paint seem to run in a direction opposite the final orientation and hanging of the work. Although the haptic texture of Tharsis Ridge can evoke an imagined surface of the Martian volcanic plane, Bradley’s works always remain abstract in contrast to those of artists like Vija Celmins. In her engagement with drawing and technological reproduction in Moon Surface (Luna 9) #1 (fig. 5), dating from the year of the first moon landing, Celmins turned to the surface of the moon based on NASA photographs, while Bradley in his abstractions only evokes the macrocosm and its distant surface textures as an association. The artist dedicated himself to abstraction when “I found out that Kodak can do [representation] far better than I can.” But abstraction for Bradley goes beyond the concept of classical abstraction in art history, and in the words of the artist Alma Thomas becomes “life enhancing elements of color.” For Bradley emphasizes a clear difference to the abstraction of the postwar period: “It’s just art that’s clean and free and wide open, unlike the art of the fifties and forties which was cloudy. … Today’s art might be telling a secret about the earth’s environment. Art is becoming clean and neat. Clarity moves me. Maybe it’s a message, a prophecy, I don’t know.” Here too, the artist refers to Clement Greenberg’s promotion of Post-Painterly Abstraction and its continuation of the achievements of Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg’s significance for Bradley cannot be emphasized enough, since he stated: “Clement Greenberg came to the studio every other week. And we looked at my paintings and spoke about color all day long.” Even in light of the fact that Greenberg’s formalism no longer corresponds to the approach of today’s art history, the ingredient of “permanent surprise,” especially in questions of abstraction, remains a core element that Bradley constantly presents in his works, which is linked to his joy in experimentation and his search for the unlimited openness of color. This is a force that defines his art, for “this art is all light and open,” as Bradley put it. In this process, he emphasizes the materiality of paint and its body as a substance as well as the visual-physical quality of color and its wavelength, both in the sense of a material-based “other history of modernism.” Bradley’s more profound interest in paint is also reflected in his collaboration with Sam Golden from the paint company Bocour Artist Colors. Golden founded his own company in 1980, Golden Artist Colors, to take the advancement of acrylic paints further. Bocour Artist Colors had already been the paint source for the artists of Abstract Expressionism such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock, and had developed the first acrylic paints in the late 1940s. An eagerness to experiment is revealed in Bradley’s explorations of paint layers and surfaces, his “representations of paint as material, making the ‘painter’s primal material’ an artistic subject all its own.” Like Lynda Benglis’s Contraband from 1969 (fig. 6), Bradley’s Circle of Fifths demonstrates the formlessness of the paint material and what its physical and chemical qualities mean in terms of drying time, flow speed, viscosity, and attachment to other materials. But while Benglis’s experimental puddles using various colors of latex paint in a rigidified state contain an unstable and coincidental element, through the “annulation of form” Bradley obtains a landscape of ridges and valleys as if seen from above. But he ultimately seeks liberation in his experiments with paint, the transgression of artistic and personal limits, just like Alma Thomas’s creed: “Painting released me from the limitations of the past and opened the door to progressive creativity. Creative art is for all time and is therefore independent of time. It is of all ages, of every land, and if by this we mean that the creative spirit in man which produces a picture or a statue is a common to the whole civilized world, independent of age, race and nationality, the statement may stand unchallenged.”

MESOCOSM

Bradley’s gaze onto the cosmos oscillates between extroversion and introspection, macrocosm and microcosm, entirely in the sense of Ernst Bloch: “It is as if the human being were the miniature world and the world the enlarged human being. We thus arrive at the microcosm and the macrocosm. The human being is a microcosm and the world is a makanthropos, an enlarged human being.” The human being sees both the orbit and its horizon. “You see great phenomena in the sky or in puddles of oil or water on the street that create fantastic, soft colors.” He sees the colors of his surroundings and at a distance from his own human perspective. Everything is color for Bradley. He advocates color as a visual device that is autonomous and autarchic: “Most people think I will draw this apple better than anybody else has seen before. All the time drawing this fucking apple. Forget about the stamp just look at the color and it is a better thing than the apple itself. You can’t eat it but the color is better. That’s the way I see it. Other than that I don’t know what’s going on.” With the haptic quality generated by the three-dimensional paint volume and pastose gels he applies, he directs the perception of beholders to the texture of the works, thus triggering an interplay of bodies of paint and visual color qualities and impacts, opening various new spaces. As if driven by the idea of the tache shared by Gustave Courbet, Charles-François Daubigny, and Paul Cézanne as “disruptor” of the visual-spatial illusion and a synonym for a haptic texture, Bradley liberates the canvas from all constraints and declares it a theater for experimentation with color and texture. Borrowing from Louis Marin’s definition of Jackson Pollock’s “space,” Bradley’s space is defined as the space of the painting and its surroundings: first the space of the three-dimensional canvas as a membrane, second that between the canvas and the surface, the color space, and third the space between the work and the beholder, the surrounding space between “edge and border,” where the atmosphere, light, and place influence the work. Due to their complex color nuances and their relief, Bradley’s paintings in particular interact in a special way with the surrounding space, the mesocosm.

In 1973 the artist began to amplify the relief of his works by using gels, as in Tharsis Ridge (cat. 6) and Far Side (cat. 7). The gel structure in Far Side shows in an exemplary way an experimental and free approach to the body of the paint using counterproof or utensils such as the spatula or knife, which Bradley used to cut out dried parts of the painting and injure the surface. And in the next step, the spray gun served to apply paint to the outside of the gel material: “With a spray gun I can’t foresee what will happen to the surface. With the hand it’s all predictable. The spray gun, you know, has a kind of mind of its own.” So he added a new layer of paint and texture to the relief, which he in turn designed by manipulating the degree of paint’s dilution and settings on the spray gun, through which a multilayered quality literally inheres in Bradley’s works. The rear of Tharsis Ridge (cat. 8), for example, shows that the canvas as ground and three-dimensional body is part of this multilayered structure in that the artist soaked it with a highly diluted layer of paint before building up the paint space on top of the canvas. Bradley had already replaced the brush with mechanical devices in the early 1970s, but he evokes it in Oblivious Venus from 1974 (cat. 9) without actually using it, reconstructing brushstrokes in green and orange on the gel relief that had been previously applied with a knife, like a monument to the painterly gesture. The same is true in Shamp III from 1976 (cat. 10), where he generated “brushstrokes” from the orange and yellow, but also pink and violet bodies of paint applied with the knife, and took up the idea of taches as “disruptors” of the visual illusion. He amplified the three-dimensionality of the layers of paint and the taches in particular in part by using strongly diluted blueish-greenish paint applied from the side with a spray gun.

The human perspective and the mesocosm come to the foreground by focusing attention on the haptic feel of the painting’s relief, for it is this haptic quality that links the work with the world of the beholder. This link was further strengthened in Bradley’s Mal Action I (cat. 11), a virtually quadratic work from 1977 with striking slatelike structures of foam rubber affixed with gel (cat. 11, detail)—the title labels the painting a mistake—by replacing the things of our mesocosm with a butterfly (monarch butterfly) and a leaf. In this way, the splotches and sprayed patterns in muted to strong shades become signs of our immediate surroundings and the work itself becomes an assemblage. In the mid-1980s, Bradley intensified his engagement with the objecthood of paintings, adding, as in Gerrett & Ted’s Window (cat. 12) or Bamboo Union (cat. 13), stones and other natural materials to his works, whereby he introduced the aspect of the environment and nature around us into his oeuvre. Real biological material and an authenticity of texture and paint based on this thus found its way into Bradley’s art and his color universalism and color materialism. In Ivy (2005–13, cat. 14), Bradley later amplified the object character by adding larger pieces of tree bark and a sea urchin combined with aluminum slats and wire, thus generating a dialectic between natural and synthetic materials and between the corresponding types of textures and colors.

One important aspect of Bradley’s art is the orientation of his works, which the artist sometimes changes after completion. In 1973, for example, he exhibited Tharsis Ridge at André Emmerich Gallery vertically, while on the rear (perhaps later) stipulating a hanging that was turned ninety degrees in the counterclockwise direction. Or in the case of Ruling Light (cat. 3), Bradley initially intended a vertical hanging, as shown by the placement of the title, signature, date, and an arrow on the reverse, but later added another arrow to indicate a horizontal hanging. This playing with the direction of the image always began with selecting part of the picture. For example, the artist cut his canvases, often treated over long periods of time, into several works or discarded part of the canvas, which he then later continued working on. Here, he used tape to fix the section of the painting, a technique that Clement Greenberg is supposed to have suggested. Formats varied between standard high and horizontal formats to cinemascope formats (cat. 1, 3, 5, 6, and 15), whereas moderate and extreme horizontal formats were sometimes marked as vertical formats (cat. 2, 4, 9, and 10). Accordingly, like the hanging direction, the titles in Bradley’s oeuvre are never complete. His titles that refer to “places that meant something to me at that moment” vary over the years, as can be seen in his correspondence with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on Pink Elephant from 1970-71. They refer to places of longing, spaces and locations that can be in orbit, but also luxury cars, cultural icons, or jazz, in the sense of (imagined) images or topoi—Bradley understands them in general as “[places] I have been to.” Just like his works themselves are imagined images or topoi that are evoked in the search for what color is and what color means, in the (pretended) gaze from outer space, to outer space, or on a planet as collective memories of landscapes. Bradley also clearly sees that abstraction was not actually developed in the frame of Eurocentric art history: “My feeling is that black artists have been pushed into a kind of realism feature which is not acceptable to our race as we are abstract people. We invented all that. … Picasso stole every bit of it.” In so doing, Bradley took a clear position against abstraction as “the white man’s art” and values color and abstraction for their sociopolitical meaning and resistant quality, as Darby English explains: “Artists such as Bradley and Thomas did not use doctrine or physical actions to exploit their intimacy with nonblack modernists. But they enacted advanced integration by working rigorously within the modernist paradigm, which they found capacious. … What makes them important is the opening in historical thought this deviance invites us to enter.” English later explains, “[F]or Hunt, Lawrence, and Williams—as well as for Bradley, Thomas, Clark, Loving, Edwards, Whitten, and several others—art was the realm into which the reach of community and its significations had to be restricted.”

MICROCOSM

Freed of all stylistic constraints, after the turn of the century Bradley reached the greatest openness and highest degree of freedom in his art in a constantly ongoing process of creation: “Anything you do every day if you are a human being makes you a better human being than you are trying to be.” The creative process and everyday life flowed together in his permanent action. Bradley’s work changed every day, with the changes in the colors around him and in his surroundings, with the seasons and nature. “The seasons give me encouragement to work. Different times in the year I get more inspired with color, changing color of leaves, what ice does, everything changes every day. I am impressed by that because that’s just the way it works.” Bradley even let nature play its own creative role, just as August Strindberg once concluded his essay “On Chance in Artistic Creation” with the following call: “The art of the future (which will disappear, like everything else!): Imitate nature closely; above all, imitate nature’s way of creating!” Or in the words of the Norwegian painter and printmaker Edvard Munch, who followed Strindberg’s dictum when he said a few years later: “Art is humanity’s drive toward crystallization. Nature is the eternal immense kingdom that art feeds on.” Munch gave free reign to nature’s creativity in his “kill-or-cure treatment” or “horse cure,” when he subjected the paintings to natural weather conditions and thus integrated the element of chance and the processual aspect of accelerated aging into his oeuvre. Bradley also created many works outdoors, building “landscapes” in nature using various objects and hung his canvases over them. Here, instead of the spray gun, he used water as the main ingredient, soaking the canvases beforehand so they could absorb the paint. Bradley’s canvas is thus treated and negotiated as a three-dimensional body, as a subjectile: “I realized that I don’t need [the spray gun] now. Because now my road to success is water. … You have to get the canvas to take paint.” But while Munch let his oeuvre created with the brushstroke be reworked by nature, Bradley integrates the impact of nature into his overall process of creation as part of a fundamental impetus to reduce his own possibilities of influence and control. In so doing, the materiality of the subjectile and the paints, the adhesiveness of the binders, gels, and chemicals, and the woven density of the canvas determine the result. The creative and at the same time ruinous effect of natural forces generates the “fascination of patina,” and leads to new image structures, such as the crystalline structures of frozen paints. Under the influence of the natural effects of the wind and weather, paint is removed or washed out, entire parts of the painting are obliterated, and the surface of the subjectile is exposed. 

The decisive agent in Bradley’s works in recent years has constantly been water, which he applies in a first step with a paint roller to make the subjectile absorbent, just like priming a canvas. Bradley’s built structures and uneven surfaces result in the directions in which the fluids flow across the canvas, leaving puddles of paint and material whose slow drying creates layered organic forms like sediment deposits. Some works evoke floating algae or microbes from the microcosm, the world in miniature and within ourselves, while others evoke eruptions and things distant. But it is always what lies beneath, the concealed, the canvas as a membrane, which is the cosmos that forms the foundation of these works. In this way, the countless water molecules in the puddles of water, the rivulets, the wet that seeps through the membrane of the canvas, distribute the pigments and the chemicals. Or a stream of water from a garden hose replaces the brush and virtually atomizes the islands of paint that the artist previously threw at the canvas with a palette knife, virtually hurling it, applying it with a mechanical paint mixer or a rag, or spilling or pouring it from a bucket. In so doing, (micro) cosmic patterns of paint splotches emerge, like eruptions and energetic processes. Standing on or next to the subjectile, Bradley tears, wears down, sprays, and waters the works or leaves them out in heavy rainstorms and lets nature do the creating. They are open experiments with paints, gels, all sorts of chemicals, and the canvas as a subjectile with various physical and chemical qualities that allow the works to emerge and bear within them a “permanent surprise.” Bradley thus understands the canvas and the paint both as a body and an optical phenomenon and a visual device that is autonomous and autarchic. The life and work of the involved artist and the traces of nature’s own creation together effect a disappearance and emergence of layers of paint and the traces of natural creation, and thus mark a temporal horizon that includes the entire process of the work’s creation and makes palpable the temporality of the natural aging process of the work, nature, and the artist himself. Insects, leaves, petals, stones, sand, but also plastic toys, pieces of zebra skin from a trip to South Africa in the 1980s, to the skins that developed on buckets of paint that have been left open find their way into these works of openness and freedom. And thus, Bradley creates every day, every hour, something approaching a documentation of his life itself, a proof of his existence in the face of the eternally ticking clock of life and the world and constant change, with every passing day, every passing year. For “it’s all about work every day.” And each day anew, he struggles with his work and tries to win: “If I paint I gonna win the battle.”

Beside the wind and weather and the essence and creation of nature, music is a fixed part of Bradley’s art. “I have to have music otherwise I can’t paint … I think I can promote the feeling of what I am thinking of music to color. In fact I can get the color to go with the music I am listening to and my interpretation. Then I think I have a successful painting.” Like the flow of water, the influence of nature, the changing light, or the immediate surroundings, music is also a source of unpredictability. Music has been Bradley’s companion ever since his childhood, when he met many of the jazz greats, including Art Blakey, Erroll Garner, Harold Betters, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, and Clifford Brown. Some, like Miles Davis, even became friends and companions. The artist sees abstraction in jazz just like in his art: “Jazz is completely abstract when it comes to certain people in jazz. … It adds color to your mind.” So every sound, every movement, every dance step has its own color, or as Bradley puts it: “Every sound has a color. I could play you some music and you could tell me what color you hear.” In this way, everything becomes dance, the dance of the world, a conglomeration of environment, sound, movement, and life, all of which literally flows together in Bradley’s works: “The movement interacts with the music and that can interact with painting and so more with color. I can almost dance with color instead of dancing physically.” It is almost as if Bradley could dance, eat, and live color. A lifetime becomes the time of creation and the time of creation a lifetime: “I want to see how many things I can paint while I am alive.” And even as age advances, color remains Bradley’s proof of existence: “I am losing my memory—I kind of like it because I don’t have to think of anything. … I am only going to paint. … Nothing else I am doing.” So he continues to create without limitations or borders with his colors, resisting constant surveillance, border fences, racism, oppression, and exclusion with a limitless openness: “Dynamite!”

Dieter Buchhart, Vienna and New York, May–October 2022

Translation: Brian Currid, Berlin

1 Epigraphs: 1 Cor. 7:31 (Standard Version); Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.16, trans. Gregory Hay (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 140; August Strindberg, “The New Arts! or Chance in Artistic Creation,” in Selected Essays, trans. Michael Robinson, (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 107; Clement Greenberg, diary entry, June 3, 1963, quoted in Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 4n8.

2 See English, 3.

3 Ibid.

4 Clement Greenberg, “The Crisis of Abstract Art,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 181.

5 See English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, 10n14.

6 Simone Swan, “Conversation with Peter Bradley, Curator of The De Luxe Show,” in The De Luxe Show (Houston: Menil Foundation, 1971), 68.

7 Ibid., 67.

8 Steve Cannon, “The De Luxe Show: Introduction,” in The De Luxe Show, 14.

9 Ibid.

10 “De Luxe Interview with Clement Greenberg,” The De Luxe Show, 65.

11 English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, 37.

12 Cannon, “The De Luxe Show: Introduction,” 14.

13 Ibid., 13.

14 Peter Bradley in conversation with the author, August 24, 2020.

15 Portia de Rossi, introductory text, General Public, www.generalpublic.art.

16 The French expression tache (related to toucher) stands for a form devoid of meaning. The emergence of a tache requires touching the canvas with a brush or some other painting device.

17 See Monika Wagner, Das Material der Kunst: Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001),

26. Artists, theorists, and critics of the nineteenth century were aware of the importance of the material qualities of paint. Already in 1799, the eclectic landscape painter J. M. W. Turner was criticized for his “painterly excesses” in his sketch-like pictures; see Evelyn Joll, “Who Bought Turner’s Late Pictures and How Were These Received?” in Exploring Late Turner,

ed. Leslie Parris (New York: Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, 1999), 105–11.

18 Swan, “Conversation with Peter Bradley,” 68.

19 Ibid.

20 English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, 213.

21 Swan, “Conversation with Peter Bradley,” 68.

22 Alma Thomas, quoted in Darby English, “A Year in the Life of Color,” in Alma Thomas: Recent Paintings, 1975/76 (The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 39.

23 Swan, “Conversation with Peter Bradley,” 67.

24 Peter Bradley in a conversation with the author, August 24, 2020.

25 Peter Bradley, quoted in English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, 7.

26 Wagner, Das Material der Kunst, 1 (all translations by BC). See also Dieter Buchhart, ed., Edvard Munch. Zeichen der Moderne (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007), 11–23.

27 See Golden Artist Colors, www.goldenpaints.com.

28 Wagner, Das Material der Kunst, 48.

29 Ibid.

30 Alma Thomas, quoted in “Four African-American Artists: Interview,” Art Gallery 8, no. 7 (April 1970): 36.

31 Ernst Bloch, Antike Philosophie: Leipziger Vorlesungen zur Geschichte der Philosophie 1950–1956, vol. 1, ed. Ruth Römer and Burghart Schmidt, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 435 (translated by BC).

32 Swan, “Conversation with Peter Bradley,” 67.

33 WITH PETER BRADLEY, directed by Alex Rappoport (2002).

34 See Anthea Callen, The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique & The Making of Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 172.

35 See Louis Marin, “L’Espace Pollock,” Cahiers du Musée d’art moderne, no. 10 (1982), 316–27.

36 Ibid., 318 and 327.

37 Swan, “Conversation with Peter Bradley,” 68.

38 See WITH PETER BRADLEY and English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, 3n4.

39 Peter Bradley in conversation with the author, August 24, 2020.

40 Correspondence between Kelly Baum, curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Karma reveals that several different titles for the painting have been mentioned by Bradley since the work was donated to the museum, and that the definitive title remains unclear. Baum, email to Karma, April 26, 2022.

41 Peter Bradley in conversation with the author, August 24, 2020.

42 WITH PETER BRADLEY.

43 Vivian Ayers, quoted in D. J. Hobdy, “DeLuxe Art Show in Ghetto Met with Mixture of Reactions,” Houston Chronicle, October 1, 1971.

44 English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, 22–23 and 37.

45 WITH PETER BRADLEY.

46 Ibid.

47 August Strindberg, “The New Arts! or Chance in Artistic Creation,” 107.

48 Edvard Munch, quoted in Poul Erik Tøjner, Munch: Med egne ord (Oslo: Forlaget, 2000), 131n57.

49 For more on this, see Dieter Buchhart, “Das Verschwinden im Werk Edvard Munchs. Experimentemit Materialisierung und Dematerialisierung,” vol. 1 (PhD diss., Universität Wien, 2004), 41–106.

50 In the following, the visual support will be defined as “subjectile” due to the loss of neutrality. The subjectile is a three-dimensional membrane that serves as a substrate of the subject and shows a visual presence and influences the emergence or formation of an artwork both by way of its physical, material characteristics—porosity, absorptiveness, and destructibility—and its surface structure as canvas grain, foundation, and paint. In so doing, the subjectile in Munch’s work constantly oscillates in the sense of its fundamental duality between a three-dimensional body and a surface that adheres to twodimensionality. See ibid., 42–56 and 60–87; see also Tristan L. Klingsor, “Pierre Bonnard,” in L’Amour de l’art 2, no. 8 (August 1921): 241–46. Jacques Derrida points out that Antonin Artaud used the term “subjectile” to refer to his drawings three times. The first time, on September 23, 1932, he closes a letter to André Rolland de Renéville in the following way: “Herewith a bad drawing in which what is called the subjectile betrayed me.” In 1946, Artaud mentioned the subjectile a second time in relation to a “maladroit motif”: “This drawing is a grave attempt to give life and existence to what until today had never been accepted in art, the botching of the subjectile, the piteous awkwardness of forms crumbling around an idea after having for so many eternities labored to join it. The page is soiled and spoiled, the paper crumpled, the people drawn with the consciousness of a child.” Artaud mentioned the subjectile a final time in February 1947: “The figures on the inert page said nothing under my hand. They offered themselves to me like millstones which would not inspire the drawing, and which I could probe, cut, scrape, file, sew, unsew, shred, slash, and stitch without the subjectile ever complaining through father or through mother.” See Derrida, “To Unsense the Subjectile,” in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, Derrida and Paule Thévenin, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 66.

51 WITH PETER BRADLEY.

52 Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” trans. David Kettler, Hudson Review 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1958): 382.

53 WITH PETER BRADLEY.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 Cannon, “The De Luxe Show: Introduction,” 12.