George Wardlaw: Outward Expressionism

by Leah Tripplett, Art New England, July/August 2012

Asculptor, painter, jewelry maker, and teacher, George Wardlaw is also a father and family man. It’s fitting then that George Wardlaw: Crossing Borders, the first major monograph of his life and work that situates him within the canon of twentieth-century American art, begins with a foreward by independent curator Lori Friedman, noting how she first met Wardlaw at an Amherst, Massachusetts, Little League game. Their meet-ing led Wardlaw to invite Friedman to visit his Amherst studio, not far from where he had taught for the bulk of his career at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Friedman recalls that she was immediately impressed by the scope and richness of Wardlaw’s works, and recognized at once its strength in regard to the work of his much-lauded peers. “And yet, throughout his career, George remained devoted to his teaching, his family life, and without fail to the pursuit of making art, driven by his passion and desires rather than responding to the pressures of pop-ular art trends,” writes Friedman. “The body of work that has emerged from this freedom of expression is remarkable, and reveals a story that is both personal and universal, weaving one man’s individual perspective into the larg-er context of the canon of modern and contem-porary art.” With essays by J. Richard Gruber, director emeritus of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art; On Z. Soltes, professorial lectur-er in Theology and Fine Arts at Georgetown University; as well as Suzette McAvoy, director of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and with significant participation of the artist and his family, George Wardlaw: Crossing Borders achieves just that. Cumulatively, the book bril-liantly articulates Wardlaw’s diverse oeuvre as at once particular to his time, as well as intri-guingly anachronistic from his peers in the art world and beyond.

Wardlaw was exposed to art-making as a child, but not conventionally. He was born in 1927 in northeastern Mississippi, and raised on a farm not far from there. An only child, Wardlaw worked as a farmhand, and was exposed to aesthetics through his mother’s quiltmaking and his father’s drawings of their hunting dogs. In his essay, “George Wardlaw: Art in Process, 1947-1975,” Gruber recounts these first, fleeting exposures to making, as well as Wardlaw’s own tentative forays into craft and design. Thanks to his GI benefits, after service in the Navy during World War II, Wardlaw enrolled at the Memphis Academy of Arts. Gruber contextualizes the academy’s curriculum and structure in the late ’40s, as well as Wardlaw’s student work within abstract expressionism and the resurgent “second American craft revival.” In 1951, Wardlaw graduated from the academy and enrolled at the University of Mississippi’s MFA program, where his painterly aesthetic and jewelry (which he conceives as small sculp-tures) was invigorated by two abstract expres-sionists who would profoundly affect Ward-law’s life and work: David Smith and Jack Tworkov. The latter would acutely influence what would become a major, if not essential, component of Wardlaw’s artistry: spirituality.

Gruber deftly sketches Wardlaw’s burgeon-ing sense of the spiritual in art, as well as his nascent Judaism (Wardlaw converted from Baptism to Judaism as a young adult), in “Spiritual Journeys and Borders Between Realms.” Soltes hones in on the spiritual in Wardlaw’s art, tracing its beginnings and bur-rowing into fruition. “His path has been forged of the intertwining and dynamic contention of two fundamental realities: change and constant growth and transfor-mation on the one hand, and a core consistency on the other hand that may be perceived throughout his work,” writes Soltes. Perhaps no one touched Wardlaw’s life and work, spiritually or otherwise, more than his wife of fifty plus years, Judy Spivack, whom he met while teaching at SUNY, New Paltz. Wardlaw first became interested in Judaism through Tworkov and Ben Bishop (his/ mentor at the Memphis Academy of Arts), as well as his own summer teaching at the Tripp Lake Camp in Poland, Maine, an all-girls Jewish camp.

In his lyrical and erudite essay, Soltes explores spirituality in art generally, as well as that which is uniquely Wardlaw’s, integrating him within the larger history of art. But it is McAvoy who most intimately and humanly incorporates Wardlaw into this history, in terms of his identities as a Jewish, American, and twentieth-century artist. In “Divining the Numinous: Maine Paintings,” McAvoy consid-ers Wardlaw’s late paintings of the Maine coast as persistent, “sensitive and intelligent investi-gations into the nature of art and its ability to communicate across time and culture. Deriving from concrete perceptions first observed in nature, then stored and filtered through the artist’s memory, the abstracted imagery of Wardlaw’s Maine paintings reflects a profound awareness of the spiritual and metaphysical properties of the sentient world.”

Through a vigorous commitment to transcending physical and spiritual borders, propelled by traditional values, Wardlaw is quintessentially American, as well as an anachronism. His work, however, warrants critical appreciation at a national level. Dedi-cated to his wife, who passed away in May 2008, George Wardlaw: Crossing Borders is a lav-ishly illustrated and richly deserved paean to Wardlaw’s devotion to artistic innovation and creation and his perseverance in these pursuits.

Sculpting the Bible

by Stewart Kampel, Hadassah Magazine, June/July 2012

George Wardlaw, a child of the Depression who converted to Judaism in 1955, toiled prolifically and creatively as a painter, jewelry-maker and sculptor over a 60-plus-year career, and now his colorful, expressionist work has been captured in a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book. Of particular interest in Crossing Borders are the Jewish themes, as explained by Ori Z. Soltes, former director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.

Beginning in the 1980s, Soltes notes, Wardlaw started to create a series of imposing acrylic-on-aluminum sculptural works called “Doors.” These bundled columns of blue, red and multi-patterned convex, concave and angular forms led to “Passages XI: Exodus,” a seven-part series recalling the narrative of the Israelites’ departure from Egyptian servitude. His Parting of the Red Sea is 92 x 204 x 66 inches. In another work, Wardlaw uses chimneys to symbolize the Holocaust, depicts a series of elements rising to signify Creation and shows us the Ten Commandments. The ideas of Exodus, particularly the plagues, are also represented in pencil, ink and acrylic on Mylar paintings.

The book recounts how Wardlaw was raised on a farm in Mississippi and emerged from his modest beginnings to become a member of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 1950s and 1960s and, later, an influential teacher. After serving in the military in World War II, Wardlaw studied art and taught at the University of Mississippi with noted Jewish artist Jack Tworkov and was later recruited by Tworkov to teach at Yale University before serving as the chair of the art department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. —Stewart Kampel