The artist Robert Irwin, a colossal figure in reductive Modernism, died today at the age of 95.
His list of accomplishments is almost as long as the demonstrable influence he had on how art itself is fabricated, displayed and revered.
Here is one second-hand story of the man and a first-hand anecdote of my own.
A contemporary of Irwin’s pointed out to me that far from didactic, Irwin’s art was purposefully ambiguous, made for the viewer to fill in the meaning. I retorted that so many hack artists play that game of “Oh the viewer should find their own meaning in my work”, surely a man of this stature had at the basis of his practice a foundational resolve.
But my source pointed out the artistic brilliance that allows collectors, curators, institutions and aesthetes to all find a reflection of their own reality in innovative art. My source reminded me that history is the shrewdest of all formalists.
And just as I was in a state of satisfaction with Irwin’s stance, the bombshell followed. “The best part of being inarticulate and having sloppy recordkeeping is it allowed him to fabricate work that was receiving attention and back-date it.” My source claimed this happened many times, especially with the disc paintings, all allegedly from the 1960s. But there was only admiration in my source’s voice, “If ideas are art, Bob’s only crime was procrastination in the service of perfection.”
I saw the Irwin retrospective at MOCA back in that other century and wasn’t so impressed with the clunky curation demanding a transcendent experience from viewers without even delivering decent lighting; but every time I saw an Irwin at Ace Gallery on Wilshire – it was always an historic piece there and given immeasurable amounts of space the museum could not be bothered to fork over – the sublime appeared as if by teleportation from the 23rd century, where Irwin may have left for earlier today to get busy with new incarnations of space and light and their sacred mixing with our feeble, hopeful consciousness.
My first-hand story is in exhibiting a rare early work of Irwin’s back in 2020. It was an unseen 1952 signed watercolor fantasyscape by the master himself and it highlighted my booth featuring alumni of the Chouinard School of Art.
Someone interviewed me about this historic picture and it went like this:
“This Irwin serves as an entry to his work,” said Mat Gleason, “This picture captures his interest in light and space – and landscaping as fine art – with the vocabulary of a pre-modernist 23-year-old. That he was groundbreaking in how he expressed these concepts and visions in ways they had never been seen before is why he matters; that he made work prior to those breakthroughs which approximated the same concerns in a more conventional approach reaffirms Irwin’s commitment to the content of his work, as opposed to being an artist who just wants to be radical for radicality’s sake. He really cared about light and space even when he was a 23-year old art student.”
Then they interviewed the director of the Chouinard Foundation, Dave Tourjé and it went like this:
Tourjé concurs and is even MORE emphatic, “There aren’t many early works by Irwin, speculation is he destroyed what hadn’t been sold or given away, and so this has a “Rosetta Stone” quality to it. This painting is literally Chapter One in the Robert Irwin story and it happened at the Chouinard School of Art and our booth at the fair gives people a taste of what that might have been like, the company one would keep.”
Irwin was just 23 when he enrolled in Chouinard when it was still The Chouinard School of Art. He taught classes there when it was the Chouinard Art Institute in 1957 and 1958. So the hype train around this versatile giant of the reductive was always rolling and it will probably roll on for a few more centuries.
Rest In Peace Robert Irwin: September 12, 1928 – October 25 2023.
Lead image of Robert Irwin’s window installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla, California from the video MAX ESTENGER & ROBERT IRWIN courtesy of Max Estenger. VIDEO LINK