Abstract expressionist John McLaughlin
John McLaughlin (1898-1976) was a modernist painter whose name was rarely spoken with those of other celebrated American artists of the post-war period. Self-taught, the Southern Californian produced abstract geometric works in relative anonymity. He is now the subject of a long-overdue retrospective of his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, titled John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction (through April 16, 2017).
Pictured: “Untitled #16” (1961) by John McLaughlin.
By CBSNews.com senior producer David Morgan
John McLaughlin
Growing up outside Boston, John McLaughlin never attended college, but was introduced to fine art through his mother and his family with visits to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He and his mother both had an affinity for Japanese art and Asian culture, and he went with his wife to Asia and spent years in China, Japan and India. When he returned to the States, he sold Asian art.
A self-taught artist, McLaughlin bought his canvases at Sears. He used house paint, and stored paintings in his garage, which meant the condition of many of his surviving works was not great. “He lived in Southern California three blocks from the beach in Orange County in Dana Point; that’s not exactly great climate for the care and feeding and preservation of works of art,” said curator Stephanie Barron.
"Untitled"
“Untitled” (1951) by John McLaughlin.
McLaughlin was a late bloomer, starting in the 1950s when he was in his fifties, when abstract expressionism was epitomized by the works of Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.
“It’s absolutely the antithesis of what [McLaughlin’s] paintings are,” LACMA curator Stephanie Barron told CBS News. “Those are usually large, they’re gestural, they’re colorful, and you feel like the artists have put their guts out onto the painting. McLaughlin’s paintings by comparison are easel-size, they’re intimate, they’re abstract, they don’t tell a story. There’s no personal brush mark on the canvas. So they’re perhaps a little harder for people to kind of fall into.”
Installation
CBS News’ Ben Tracy asked, “Given that they aren’t literal, that there are no titles, that when you look at it, you’re not exactly sure what you’re looking at, does that make it harder to appreciate, especially for your more casual museum-goer?”
“I think it does,” Stephanie Barron replied. “Abstract art, and particularly geometric abstract art, can be difficult. It doesn’t tell you a story. It doesn’t play to your obvious emotion. But it gives back a tremendous amount if you give it the time. But you have to give it the time to let your eye adjust, let your soul adjust.
“That’s asking a lot of people when we’re so accustomed to looking at a bombardment images. But that’s one of the things that art can do, is that it does make us slow down. And it’s not about a nanosecond of multiple images coming at us across Instagram.”
"Untitled"
“Untitled” (1957) by John McLaughlin.
“One thing is clear about his works -- it almost requires the viewer to complete them,” Barron said. “I mean, these are works that are about the relationship of the viewer to the object. It’s not telling a story, it’s not a reduction of nature. There’s no sense of, ‘Oh, yellow, gee, that must be the sun,’ or ‘Blue, that must be the sea.’ The color has no relationship to something in our observed world. Everything’s untitled. So there are no traditional clues.”
John McLaughlin's Studio
“When we look at these canvases and we see the rectangular shapes, we see the fact that he doesn’t always deal with bisecting a canvas directly in the middle,” said Barron. “It’s always a little off-center, but just enough so that it causes you to have to spend a lot of time figuring out what the composition is. When he would create these, he sometimes would work with construction paper and actually come up with what was the relationship of the forms and the colors.”
"#21-1958"
John McLaughlin poses with his “#21-1958” at the San Clemente Men’s Golf Club, California, in 1962.
"#10"
“#10” (1965) by John McLaughlin.
“In Japanese there’s a sense of something called Ma, which is the void,” Barron said. “It’s the thing between two objects or between two forms. And what McLaughlin tried to do, and I think did quite successfully, was give that void a voice. And make that void an equal part of the composition. And I think it’s partly what makes the canvases so interesting and dynamic. Because there’s that constant play between the rectangles and the void, the void and the rectangles.”
"#29-1960"
“#29-1960” (1960) by John McLaughlin.
Christopher Knight, chief art critic for the Los Angeles Times, was a curator at a small museum in La Jolla, Calif., in 1976 when he first heard of John McLaughlin.
“Knew nothing about him. And I was just stunned by how radical and interesting the painting was,” he told CBS News’ Sara Kugel. “And so I began to look into who the artist was, and was surprised still to find out that it was very difficult to find out information about him. He wasn’t in a lot of collections, in a lot of museums. He seemed to have almost disappeared.”
"#26"
“#26” (1961) by John McLaughlin.
“McLaughlin was working from a Japanese foundation, not a European foundation,” said Christopher Knight. “The avant-garde in New York was all about the transfer of avant-garde ideas from European modernism to New York. McLaughlin working in southern California, and having lived in Japan and spend a good deal of time in India and China and in the Pacific region before and during after the war, was working from a whole different point of view.
“So his work, in some respects conceptually couldn’t be seen. People didn’t know exactly what they were looking at. If you’re looking at a geometric abstraction -- a very hard-edge, simplified geometric abstraction -- and are thinking about art, you’re thinking about European precedence, not about Asia.
“So as the art world has become less focused on its European roots and has become more international, people are beginning to understand the place that McLaughlin was working from. His work does owe something to Mondrian and to Kazimir Malevich. But they’re framed within a particular Japanese aesthetic of the void, as a place in which consciousness and perception can emerge.”
"#17-1962"
“#17-1962” (1962) by John McLaughlin.
“In the ‘50s in New York, coming after World War II, the void was a very different concept for Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. The void was a place of terror. The void was the abyss. The void was where the world had almost collapsed after [the] Holocaust and the hydrogen bomb. And that’s, in some respects, almost the opposite of what McLaughlin was doing. So if your critical sensibilities are attuned to terror and disaster, McLaughlin’s gonna look lightweight and irrelevant.”
Installation View
LACMA engaged artist and furniture maker Roy McMakin to create chairs in which visitors could sit an contemplate the artworks.
"Untitled #16"
“Untitled #16” (1962) by John McLaughlin.
Knight said McLaughlin’s paintings, as opposed to more figurative works, break all the rules of acceptable composition. “He splits his paintings in half. Who does that? Nobody does that. It’s almost as if it pries your eyes apart to look at two rectangles. And suddenly the space in between them becomes almost like it’s a figure, like it’s a rectangle, too.”
"#9-1966"
“#9-1966” (1966) by John McLaughlin.
“I would say it’s rare to find somebody who is self-taught, starts late, and nails it in a signature style very quickly,” Barron said. “I mean, he didn’t have 20 years of figuring out how to make abstract work. There’s no sense of starting with the apples on the table and reducing it and reducing it and reducing it and reducing it. It’s not what he did. So that’s pretty unusual.”
"Untitled"
“Untitled” (1969) by John McLaughlin.
“I think John McLaughlin is indisputably the first artist of international stature, postwar, in Los Angeles,” said Knight. “And I would stack him up against any American artist of the 20th century. I think he’s as significant as any postwar American artist.”
"#5"
“#5” (1974) by John McLaughlin.
Though he’d had a number of exhibitions in Los Angeles, and was included in some group shows on the East Coast in the 1960s and ‘70s, McLaughlin lived far from New York City, the epicenter of the art world, and so was unfamiliar to most. When McLaughlin - who had no children - died in 1976, he left a large body of work. “He left it to his wife, who died shortly thereafter,” said Barron. “She left it to his former dealer, who had moved to New York. He died and left it to his boyfriend, who died and left it to his brother.
“So when you want to try to introduce an artist who has died to a wide audience, you need material. And to satisfy estate taxes, many of the pictures were sold shortly after McLaughlin died. So that by time it was ready to maybe look at the material again, there was no unsold body of material. Things had found their way into private collections or to museum collections.”
"#15-1958"
“#15-1958” (1958) by John McLaughlin.
“One of the challenges in putting this show together was to search for works that were really in good condition,” said Barron. “And for every painting that you see on the wall, there were probably five that we looked at and decided not to include for one reason or another, often because of condition.
“McLaughlin was prolific, and we did track down works all over the country. But we had to work super hard to make sure that the works we did include are in excellent condition.”
Signature
“There’s a resurgence of interest in going back to the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s and finding those artists who may not have been the ones who were the bold-faced names the first time around,” said Barron. “But these are artists who perhaps more quietly and perhaps with less economic success continued to create a really powerful body of work. And I think that’s sometimes what museums can offer. It’s not just showing what everybody knows; it’s introducing to a public an artist where people come in and say, ‘Wow, how could I not know his work? It’s so interesting.’”
Installation View
For more info:
John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction, at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through April 16, 2017)
Exhibition Catalogue: “John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction”