Sundaram Tagore

Over the past fifty years. Lee Waisler has broken many boundaries, both aesthetic and geographic. In the process, he has expanded the language of painting. In order to understand his impact and the language he has created, it is important to look at the cultural climate he has lived and worked in, and to probe the visual psychology that underlies his creative process.

Lee Waisler was born in Los Angeles, California in 1938. He has spoken at length about the cultural patina of the city of Los Angeles, the denizens of Hollywood, and the influence of both upon his sensibility. Waisler began his artistic studies at the Hollywood Academy of Art at the age of seven, and his profession was in many ways defined by this early engagement with the art of the period. In the 1940s and '50s, when the center of the art world shifted from Europe to America, Waisler was becoming aware of such names as Pollack, Rothko, and Newman—artists who would define the new aesthetic age after Picasso, Matisse, and Braque. Drawn to the writings of Samuel Beckett and the works of Alberto Giacometti and Mark Rothko, Waisler began to produce seductively rich paintings that demonstrated an obsessive interest in surface textures.

His early works, which consisted of sculptures, paintings, and installations, were socially and politically charged with such cataclysmic events as the Holocaust, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War— a focus that sharply differentiated him from the California School of Abstraction spearheaded by Clyfford Still. He became a familiar figure in the media, known as an activist-artist and as the creator of such works as Target L.A., Under the Mushroom, and Overkill-depictions of a city being ravaged by an atomic bomb. His work during this period resonated with socially conscious forms that embraced the issues affecting the planet, though he simultaneously grappled with more painterly concerns.

Ultimately, his aesthetic and social explorations became more solitary, and in the 1970s and '80s he retreated to his studio to focus on formal issues, producing works that possessed aspects of Abstract Expressionism within a Constructivist framework. In a slow, accretive process, Waisler began layering his canvases with thick pigment, sand, gesso, shells, wood, glass, and other organic and inorganic materials, which opened up a wealth of sensuously beautiful compositional possibilities. He has said, "I choose materials for their innate associative values: sand for time, wood for life, black for mystery, concrete for building, light-reflective spheres for their mirror quality. These materials wake both constructive and destructive reactions."

While living near Ojai. California, in the 1970s, Waisler met the charismatic potter-artist Beatrice Wood, Marcel Duchamp's lover, and they immediately formed a bond. It was through Wood that Waisler was introduced to a host of Eastern cultural and intellectual figures, including the philosopher J. Krishnamurti. Conversations with Krishnamurti led to Waisler's belief in the Buddhist construct of constant flux and the Hindu principal of creation and destruction.

Waisler's long study of Eastern culture bore fruit when, in 1996, he was invited by the Indian prime minister I. K. Gujral to exhibit his work at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. This passage to India opened fresh aesthetic avenues, prompting him to turn from abstraction to figuration. He was thoroughly transformed by the imagery of India.

"The people are seared in my heart and mind," he said. "I cannot but paint humanity, and my attempt is to grapple with the seriousness of their endeavors." This period of figuration continues, another link in a long chain of work that has spanned decades, continents, and styles ranging from the sociopolitical to the abstract, and the figurative.

Sundaram Tagoer is a New York-based curator and gallerist. A candidate for a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, Tagore was previously a director at Pace Wilderstein in New York.