Archie Rand
Encyclopedia
Archie Rand is an artist from Brooklyn
, New York. Rand's work as a painter and mural
ist is displayed around the world, including in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
, the Art Institute of Chicago
, the Victoria and Albert Museum
in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
in Paris, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art
. His graphic works and books are in over 400 public collections including the Metropolitan Museum Of Art
, The Museum of Modern Art
, The Whitney Museum of American Art
, The Art Institute Of Chicago
, The Brooklyn Museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art
, the Smithsonian Institution
, and The New York Public Library; and are owned by many universities, among which are Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Johns Hopkins.
in cinegraphics from the Pratt Institute
, having studied previously at the Art Students League of New York
. His first exhibition was in 1966, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery
in New York. He has since had over 100 solo exhibitions, and his work has been included in over 200 group exhibitions.
He is currently Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College
. Before joining Brooklyn College, Rand was the chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University
. He had served as the Acting Director of the Hoffberger School of Painting and as Assistant Director of the Mount Royal Graduate Programs, both at the Maryland Institute College of Art
. From 1992-4 he was appointed Co-Chair of the National Studio Arts Program of the College Art Association
and from 1998-2003 he served as Chair of the College Art Association National Committee for the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award. The Italian Academy For Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University presented him with The Siena Prize in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation
Foundation Fellowship in 1999 and was made a Laureate of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture
, which awarded him the Achievement Medal for Contributions in the Visual Arts. In 2002 he received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching from Columbia University. In 2002 he became the artistic advisor to film director Ang Lee
for his production of The Hulk
, and was asked by Milestone Films
to provide a commentary track for the DVD release of Henri-Georges Clouzot
’s classic 1955 film The Mystery of Picasso
.
, Color Field
, Pattern and Decoration
, diary entry and social commentary.
Although The Letter Paintings had been displayed individually, they were first shown as a unit in an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art
in 1983. Selections from The Letter Paintings have been on continuing multi-venue exhibition tours of the United States and Europe (including Palazzo Ducale, Genoa) since their Exit Art
exhibition in 1991. Roberta Smith
, art critic for The New York Times
and a lecturer on contemporary art, described them as "exhilarating, precocious and lyric" and wrote that "Rand’s paintings demand a substantial place in the history of an unusually fertile period in American art." Others described them as "an uncannily accurate step in the right direction", "[a]s exhilarating as a Charlie Parker
solo or a holler from Big Joe Turner
", and, almost thirty years after they had been painted, as carrying "the force of a visionary project".
The New York Times
called Rand’s first solo exhibition of abstract collaged canvases “An impressive debut”.
In 1974 Rand received a commission from Congregation B’nai Yosef
in Brooklyn. Rand was asked to paint thematic murals on the complete 16000 square feet (1,486.4 m²) interior surfaces of the synagogue. The work took three years, and completing this commission made Rand the author of the only narratively painted synagogue in the world and the only one we know of since the 2nd Century Dura-Europos
. The religious legal controversy raised by placing wall paintings in a traditionally iconoclastic space was resolved by the verdict of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein
, then considered to be the world’s leading Talmudic scholar, who declared the paintings to be in conformity with the law.
The murals were received with great enthusiasm: according to John Ashbery
,
Others were equally laudatory, describing the murals as "exciting and exceptional" and "a remarkably impressive achievement" and "energetic tour-de-force". The synagogue itself became known as "The Painted Shul".
As Matthew Baigell has recently written, "The B'Nai Yosef murals, then, when considered in the light of...his mixture of figurative and abstract elements; his appeal to the viewer's imagination and awareness of the artist's sense of inventiveness, are, altogether, nothing less than revolutionary in Jewish American art....After these murals, anything became possible for Jewish-American artists." The aesthetic demands of the B'Nai Yosef murals marked a turning point in Rand's work. His subsequent turn to figuration may have been influenced by his friendship with Philip Guston
, whose own work was transformed in the late 1960s. Like Guston, Rand "chafed at the limitations of purely abstract forms."
Since then Rand, whose paintings range considerably in style and scale, has been seen as a respected and unclassifiable figure in the art world:
By the 1970s and 1980s Rand had developed and maintained concurrent reputations: one as a visible gallery and museum artist whose work had loosely morphed into representation, and the other as an authority on Jewish iconography. As Dan Cameron
observed in Arts at the time, "Far from an emerging talent, Archie Rand is a seasoned young master whom history is finally catching up with." And as Barry Schwabsky described it, “His career has been a Protean flow of stylistic change. Rand’s “courage to be hybrid” as John Ashbery once put it, has led him from color field painting to a combinatory painterly image-making of dazzling dissonance... [by which he] pushed himself to the forefront of his generation’s rediscovery of 'content' in painting (a position which has yet to be generally acknowledged).”
and in 1984 received an offer to paint exterior murals at the Jerusalem Teachers College. For this project Rand asked Mark Golden of Golden Artist Colors
to develop a system for the permanent application of full color outdoor paint. Some of the imagery used in these murals was recycled into his subsequent paintings. Exhibitions from the mid-1970s onward announced a return to mural-scale paintings and showed a prescient neo-expressionism joined with a fealty to narratives which were drawn in cartoon style. As John Yau
wrote in Artforum, “Archie Rand is one of the most ambitious and more importantly, the most accomplished artist of his generation.” Holland Cotter, reviewing Rand's 1986 show in Art In America
, wrote, “His biography reads like that of a veteran. His recent paintings actually carry an air of accumulated, earned experience....that makes this work so engaging: it is built on an old-fashioned, generous inclusiveness – critical and evangelical at once – that few of Rand’s contemporaries seen interested in attempting, and none that I know of can match.”
In 1988 with master printer Jon Cone
Rand produced a surprising and imaginative series of potato prints, some editioned and some very large, which were exhibited at a number of public and private institutions. A 1988 series of 20 large triptychs (“Songs of Dispersion”) was shown in various venues in 1989.
From 1989 to 1991 he presented an unanticipated series of large-scale black and white abstractions which retain a residual authority. Donald Kuspit
reviewed the Black and White series for Artforum
at the time: “Rand’s works are post-Modernist in the best sense.... the intimacy Rand evokes is reminiscent of Paul Klee
’s: he reinvents an alphabet of familiar shapes...and the result evokes a primary sense of magical meaning and feeling." The exhibition featured large paintings which offered startling and effective revisions on the formats of contemporary abstraction, prompting critic Terry R. Myers to write in Flash Art:
Throughout the 1990s Rand produced abstract and figurative works simultaneously, although all of the works indicated an intention to re-integrate representation into conceptual formats. In 1999 he mounted an exhibit of mural-scale paintings (“The Segments”) which featured hundreds of compartmentalized painted cartoon-like images. On the occasion of a 1992 exhibition of serial paintings, which linked the Kabbalah’s view of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet to the 22 major arcana cards of the Tarot deck, David Brown wrote: “Extremely competent in any style that he chooses to call his own, it can be said of Archie what young players say of greats in the jazz world: “somebody should just break their fingers.” In 2005 he completed a substantial painting commission for Aetna
.
His work has been cited as influential, although some critics concede that his output has been difficult to pigeonhole. Rand’s paintings display a vast and savvy menu of inventive and finely executed approaches. Working often with poets, he has produced books with Robert Creeley
, John Ashbery
, John Yau
, David Lehman
and Jim Cummins
, Clark Coolidge
, and David Plante
, among others. The critical response to Rand's collaborative work with poets has been abundant and commendatory, as in this review of his work with Creeley:
He has done painting series after the work of Montale, Spicer, Beckett/Eluard among others. For each collaborative project he utilizes a different visual persona, a vestige of the stylistic crucible from which he has always worked and which he sees as being consonant with his gradual invention of an unconventional Jewish iconography. This approach stimulated an engaged correspondence with the painter R.B. Kitaj. Rand’s pioneering 1989 series “The Chapter Paintings”, which dedicated one painting to each of the 54 divisions of the Hebrew Bible, instigated the groundbreaking 1996 “Too Jewish” exhibition, that originated at the Jewish Museum
and traveled to other sites. As Vincent Brook saw it, “A useful date from which to mark the onset of postmodern American Jewish art is 1989. The year that saw the Tiananmen Square massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the premiere of Seinfeld was also the year Archie Rand exhibited [sic] at the Jewish Museum in New York a series of fifty-four paintings inspired by the yearly cycle of Torah readings. Jewish artists were by then no strangers to the upper echelons of the American art world, but baldly Jewish iconography was.”
His interest in Judaic narrative has been seen in numerous recent painting series, each of which is painted with novel technical and/or content approaches for example: “Sixty Paintings from the Bible” (1992), “The Eighteen” (1994), “The Seven Days of Creation” (1996), “The Nineteen” (2002) and “Had Gadya” (2005). In a review in 2005, of an exhibition of the 1994 series “The Eighteen”, Menachem Wecker wrote, “[Rand] has laid out a clearly demarcated path for others to follow. In his own way, he has effectively revolutionized the way the rest of us view Jewish art, heretofore an endangered species until Rand nurtured and raised it to fruition."
in San Antonio.
In 2004, a retrospective exhibition was mounted at the Yeshiva University Museum
in New York, to very positive reviews:
Writing on the occasion of the same exhibition, Richard McBee concluded:
In 2008, on a warehouse wall, Rand mounted the painting, “The 613”, which at 1700 square feet (17’ x 100’) is nearly twice the size of James Rosenquist
’s F-111. It is one of the largest freestanding paintings ever made. Reminiscent of “The Segments” paintings it is intimidatingly enormous. Paradoxically, despite the raucous cartoony bytes that shoot colorful flashes from the manic surface, “The 613” glows warmly. Its overall effect is strangely calming and majestic. It is composed of 614 contiguous panels, each of which deals with one of the obscure but traditionally fixed number of 613 commandments, which were salvaged by sages from a literal reading of the Hebrew Bible. The viewing for “The 613” took place on one day and lasted only four hours. The event drew one thousand attendees. Menachem Wecker, describing this work in The Forward
, averred that “Rand’s series is arguably the most ambitious Jewish art enterprise, perhaps ever.... It is perhaps most informative to think of Rand’s efforts to visually grapple with the commandments as a neo-Maimonidean enterprise. Just as the medieval scholar wrote works that made the Bible more accessible, Rand develops an accessible visual iconography that confronts the text.... And like Maimonides, his career will surely enjoy a life after death, as yet another generation’s visual taboos become canonized in the next.”
Prompted by this showing, the art historian Matthew Baigell reflected on Rand's accomplishments in a 2009 article:
In an article on a 2011 exhibition of Rand's "Had Gadya" series, David Kaufmann wrote
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
, New York. Rand's work as a painter and mural
Mural
A mural is any piece of artwork painted or applied directly on a wall, ceiling or other large permanent surface. A particularly distinguishing characteristic of mural painting is that the architectural elements of the given space are harmoniously incorporated into the picture.-History:Murals of...
ist is displayed around the world, including in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...
, the Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
, the Victoria and Albert Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...
in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Bibliothèque nationale de France
The is the National Library of France, located in Paris. It is intended to be the repository of all that is published in France. The current president of the library is Bruno Racine.-History:...
in Paris, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is an art museum in Tel Aviv, Israel. It was established in 1932 in a building that was the home of Tel Aviv's first mayor, Meir Dizengoff. The Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art opened in 1959. The museum moved to its current location on King Saul Avenue in...
. His graphic works and books are in over 400 public collections including the Metropolitan Museum Of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
, The Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, The Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
, The Art Institute Of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
, The Brooklyn Museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art
Baltimore Museum of Art
The Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, was founded in 1914. Built in the Roman Temple style, the Museum is home to an internationally renowned collection of 19th-century, modern, and contemporary art. Founded in 1914 with a single painting, the BMA today has 90,000 works...
, the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...
, and The New York Public Library; and are owned by many universities, among which are Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Johns Hopkins.
Education and career
Born in Brooklyn, Rand received his Bachelor of Fine ArtsBachelor of Fine Arts
In the United States and Canada, the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, usually abbreviated BFA, is the standard undergraduate degree for students seeking a professional education in the visual or performing arts. In some countries such a degree is called a Bachelor of Creative Arts or BCA...
in cinegraphics from the Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute is a private art college in New York City located in Brooklyn, New York, with satellite campuses in Manhattan and Utica. Pratt is one of the leading undergraduate art schools in the United States and offers programs in Architecture, Graphic Design, History of Art and Design,...
, having studied previously at the Art Students League of New York
Art Students League of New York
The Art Students League of New York is an art school located on West 57th Street in New York City. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists, and has maintained for over 130 years a tradition of offering reasonably priced classes on a...
. His first exhibition was in 1966, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery
Tibor de Nagy Gallery
The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is an art gallery in New York City, USA. It was involved in the discovery of many of the Second Generation Abstract Expressionist Movement’s most important artists and also representational artists of the era including Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Helen Frankenthaler,...
in New York. He has since had over 100 solo exhibitions, and his work has been included in over 200 group exhibitions.
He is currently Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...
. Before joining Brooklyn College, Rand was the chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. He had served as the Acting Director of the Hoffberger School of Painting and as Assistant Director of the Mount Royal Graduate Programs, both at the Maryland Institute College of Art
Maryland Institute College of Art
Maryland Institute College of Art is an art and design college in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. It was founded in 1826 as the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, making it one of the first and oldest art colleges in the United States. In 2008, MICA was ranked #2 in the nation...
. From 1992-4 he was appointed Co-Chair of the National Studio Arts Program of the College Art Association
College Art Association
The College Art Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for practitioners and scholars of art, art history, and art criticism...
and from 1998-2003 he served as Chair of the College Art Association National Committee for the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award. The Italian Academy For Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University presented him with The Siena Prize in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Mr. and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died April 26, 1922...
Foundation Fellowship in 1999 and was made a Laureate of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture
National Foundation for Jewish Culture
The Foundation for Jewish Culture is the leading advocate for Jewish cultural life and creativity in the United States....
, which awarded him the Achievement Medal for Contributions in the Visual Arts. In 2002 he received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching from Columbia University. In 2002 he became the artistic advisor to film director Ang Lee
Ang Lee
Ang Lee is a Taiwanese film director. Lee has directed a diverse set of films such as Eat Drink Man Woman , Sense and Sensibility , Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , Hulk , and Brokeback Mountain , for which he won an Academy...
for his production of The Hulk
Hulk (film)
Hulk is a 2003 American superhero film based on the fictional Marvel Comics character of the same name. Ang Lee directed the film, which stars Eric Bana as Dr. Bruce Banner, as well as Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Josh Lucas, and Nick Nolte...
, and was asked by Milestone Films
Milestone Films
Milestone Films is an independent company, founded in 1990 in the United States by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, dedicated to researching and distributing quality cinematographic material from around the world, including silent movies, films of the postwar foreign film renaissance, to contemporary...
to provide a commentary track for the DVD release of Henri-Georges Clouzot
Henri-Georges Clouzot
Henri-Georges Clouzot was a French film director, screenwriter and producer. He is best remembered for his work in the thriller film genre, having directed The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques, which are critically recognized to be among the greatest films from the 1950s...
’s classic 1955 film The Mystery of Picasso
The Mystery of Picasso
The Mystery of Picasso is a 1956 French documentary film about the painter Pablo Picasso. It shows Picasso in the act of creating paintings for the camera...
.
Early works
Archie Rand’s earliest major works are “The Letter Paintings” (or “The Jazz Paintings”) (1968–71), a radically positioned series of technically inventive, mural-sized canvases. The Letter Paintings, by incorporating the names of mainly male and female African-American musicians, undermined prevailing aesthetic categories by conflating many contemporary movements including Conceptual ArtConceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
, Color Field
Color Field
Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists...
, Pattern and Decoration
Pattern and Decoration
Pattern and Decoration was an art movement situated in the United States from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s. The movement has sometimes been referred to as "P&D" or as The New Decorativeness.The movement was championed by the gallery owner Holly Solomon....
, diary entry and social commentary.
Although The Letter Paintings had been displayed individually, they were first shown as a unit in an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art
Carnegie Museum of Art
The Carnegie Museum of Art, located in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is an art museum founded in 1895 by the Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie...
in 1983. Selections from The Letter Paintings have been on continuing multi-venue exhibition tours of the United States and Europe (including Palazzo Ducale, Genoa) since their Exit Art
Exit Art
Exit Art is a non-profit cultural center established in 1982. Located in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, New York City, United States, the two-story gallery exhibits contemporary visual art, installation, video, theater, and performance....
exhibition in 1991. Roberta Smith
Roberta Smith
Roberta Smith is an art critic for the New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art.Born in New York City and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, Smith studied at Grinnell College in Iowa. Her career in the arts started in 1968 while an undergraduate summer intern at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in...
, art critic for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
and a lecturer on contemporary art, described them as "exhilarating, precocious and lyric" and wrote that "Rand’s paintings demand a substantial place in the history of an unusually fertile period in American art." Others described them as "an uncannily accurate step in the right direction", "[a]s exhilarating as a Charlie Parker
Charlie Parker
Charles Parker, Jr. , famously called Bird or Yardbird, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer....
solo or a holler from Big Joe Turner
Big Joe Turner
Big Joe Turner was an American blues shouter from Kansas City, Missouri. According to the songwriter Doc Pomus, "Rock and roll would have never happened without him." Although he came to his greatest fame in the 1950s with his pioneering rock and roll recordings, particularly "Shake, Rattle and...
", and, almost thirty years after they had been painted, as carrying "the force of a visionary project".
The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
called Rand’s first solo exhibition of abstract collaged canvases “An impressive debut”.
In 1974 Rand received a commission from Congregation B’nai Yosef
B'nai Yosef Synagogue
The B'nai Yosef Synagogue, , formerly Magen David Congregation of Ocean Parkway, is an Orthodox Sephardi synagogue at the 1616 Ocean Parkway and Avenue P in Brooklyn, New York....
in Brooklyn. Rand was asked to paint thematic murals on the complete 16000 square feet (1,486.4 m²) interior surfaces of the synagogue. The work took three years, and completing this commission made Rand the author of the only narratively painted synagogue in the world and the only one we know of since the 2nd Century Dura-Europos
Dura-Europos
Dura-Europos , also spelled Dura-Europus, was a Hellenistic, Parthian and Roman border city built on an escarpment 90 m above the right bank of the Euphrates river. It is located near the village of Salhiyé, in today's Syria....
. The religious legal controversy raised by placing wall paintings in a traditionally iconoclastic space was resolved by the verdict of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein
Moshe Feinstein
Moshe Feinstein was a Lithuanian Orthodox rabbi, scholar and posek , who was world-renowned for his expertise in Halakha and was regarded by many as the de facto supreme halakhic authority for Orthodox Jewry of North America during his lifetime...
, then considered to be the world’s leading Talmudic scholar, who declared the paintings to be in conformity with the law.
The murals were received with great enthusiasm: according to John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
,
So varied and intricate are the themes Rand has treated in his murals and so multifaceted the barrage of styles he has employed, that it is difficult to describe the murals. They demand to be viewed. The sweep and eclecticism add up to a startling wholeness. The courage to be hybrid is given to relatively few artists; it was required here and Rand supplied it. The work surrounds one in an environment of wonder, of spirituality and earthiness, of joy and terror, but mostly joy. It attempts to be as diverse as Creation itself and just about succeeds.
Others were equally laudatory, describing the murals as "exciting and exceptional" and "a remarkably impressive achievement" and "energetic tour-de-force". The synagogue itself became known as "The Painted Shul".
As Matthew Baigell has recently written, "The B'Nai Yosef murals, then, when considered in the light of...his mixture of figurative and abstract elements; his appeal to the viewer's imagination and awareness of the artist's sense of inventiveness, are, altogether, nothing less than revolutionary in Jewish American art....After these murals, anything became possible for Jewish-American artists." The aesthetic demands of the B'Nai Yosef murals marked a turning point in Rand's work. His subsequent turn to figuration may have been influenced by his friendship with Philip Guston
Philip Guston
Philip Guston was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the Abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning...
, whose own work was transformed in the late 1960s. Like Guston, Rand "chafed at the limitations of purely abstract forms."
Since then Rand, whose paintings range considerably in style and scale, has been seen as a respected and unclassifiable figure in the art world:
What is undeniable is during the 1970s many of the artists who exhibited at the gallery – Rand himself, for example – were irrepressible individualists whose work resists easy classification….the phenomenally talented Rand was unsystematically working his way through every image-making language known to modern man, from material-based abstraction to narrative figuration to cartoon symbolism, sometimes all at the same time, and being given the chance to exhibit the results of his research at regular intervals.
By the 1970s and 1980s Rand had developed and maintained concurrent reputations: one as a visible gallery and museum artist whose work had loosely morphed into representation, and the other as an authority on Jewish iconography. As Dan Cameron
Dan Cameron
Dan Cameron is an American art curator based in New York City and New Orleans.Cameron's early years were spent in Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky and in Hudson Falls, NY. He attended Hudson Falls Public Schools , Syracuse University and Bennington College , where he earned a BA in 1979...
observed in Arts at the time, "Far from an emerging talent, Archie Rand is a seasoned young master whom history is finally catching up with." And as Barry Schwabsky described it, “His career has been a Protean flow of stylistic change. Rand’s “courage to be hybrid” as John Ashbery once put it, has led him from color field painting to a combinatory painterly image-making of dazzling dissonance... [by which he] pushed himself to the forefront of his generation’s rediscovery of 'content' in painting (a position which has yet to be generally acknowledged).”
1980s and 1990s
In 1980 and 1981 he was commissioned to do a series of stained glass windows for two Chicago synagogues, Anshe Emet and Temple SholomTemple Sholom
Temple Sholom is a Reform Jewish congregation located at 3480 N. Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1867, it is one of the oldest synagogues in Chicago....
and in 1984 received an offer to paint exterior murals at the Jerusalem Teachers College. For this project Rand asked Mark Golden of Golden Artist Colors
Golden Artist Colors
Golden Artist Colors is a manufacturing company that focuses almost entirely on paints, used in the fine arts, decoration, and crafts. Based in New Berlin, New York, the company produces the largest line of acrylic colors that is currently available to artists, including recreations of historic...
to develop a system for the permanent application of full color outdoor paint. Some of the imagery used in these murals was recycled into his subsequent paintings. Exhibitions from the mid-1970s onward announced a return to mural-scale paintings and showed a prescient neo-expressionism joined with a fealty to narratives which were drawn in cartoon style. As John Yau
John Yau
John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978...
wrote in Artforum, “Archie Rand is one of the most ambitious and more importantly, the most accomplished artist of his generation.” Holland Cotter, reviewing Rand's 1986 show in Art In America
Art in America
Art in America is an illustrated monthly, international magazine concentrating on the contemporary art world, including profiles of artists and genres, updates about art movements, show reviews and event schedules. It is designed for collectors, artists, dealers, art professionals and other...
, wrote, “His biography reads like that of a veteran. His recent paintings actually carry an air of accumulated, earned experience....that makes this work so engaging: it is built on an old-fashioned, generous inclusiveness – critical and evangelical at once – that few of Rand’s contemporaries seen interested in attempting, and none that I know of can match.”
In 1988 with master printer Jon Cone
Jon Cone
Born in Miami, Florida in 1957, Jon Cone is a collaborative printmaker, pioneer and developer of photographic ink jet technologies, educator, and photographer...
Rand produced a surprising and imaginative series of potato prints, some editioned and some very large, which were exhibited at a number of public and private institutions. A 1988 series of 20 large triptychs (“Songs of Dispersion”) was shown in various venues in 1989.
From 1989 to 1991 he presented an unanticipated series of large-scale black and white abstractions which retain a residual authority. Donald Kuspit
Donald Kuspit
Donald Kuspit is an American art critic, poet, and Distinguished Professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and professor of art history at the School of Visual Arts. Kuspit is one of America's most distinguished art critics. He was formerly the A....
reviewed the Black and White series for Artforum
Artforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
at the time: “Rand’s works are post-Modernist in the best sense.... the intimacy Rand evokes is reminiscent of Paul Klee
Paul Klee
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...
’s: he reinvents an alphabet of familiar shapes...and the result evokes a primary sense of magical meaning and feeling." The exhibition featured large paintings which offered startling and effective revisions on the formats of contemporary abstraction, prompting critic Terry R. Myers to write in Flash Art:
Dare a critic put a word like "inspiration" down on paper, sincerely mean it in its larger sense, and still think he or she has a voice among the pedantry that is the art world? I'm tempted to believe that there is some type of visionary impact in Archie Rand's latest paintings, but nowadays such a claim would seem delirious at best and at worst illicit. These recent works stymie into oblivion attempts to classify them-- which is nothing new for Rand, who will be difficult to pinpoint on the misleading map of art history-- but perplexity on the part of the viewer obviously does not always lead to greatness on the part of the artist. Rand's latest paintings could very well be exceptional.
Throughout the 1990s Rand produced abstract and figurative works simultaneously, although all of the works indicated an intention to re-integrate representation into conceptual formats. In 1999 he mounted an exhibit of mural-scale paintings (“The Segments”) which featured hundreds of compartmentalized painted cartoon-like images. On the occasion of a 1992 exhibition of serial paintings, which linked the Kabbalah’s view of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet to the 22 major arcana cards of the Tarot deck, David Brown wrote: “Extremely competent in any style that he chooses to call his own, it can be said of Archie what young players say of greats in the jazz world: “somebody should just break their fingers.” In 2005 he completed a substantial painting commission for Aetna
Aetna
Aetna, Inc. is an American health insurance company, providing a range of traditional and consumer directed health care insurance products and related services, including medical, pharmaceutical, dental, behavioral health, group life, long-term care, and disability plans, and medical management...
.
His work has been cited as influential, although some critics concede that his output has been difficult to pigeonhole. Rand’s paintings display a vast and savvy menu of inventive and finely executed approaches. Working often with poets, he has produced books with Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
, John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
, John Yau
John Yau
John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978...
, David Lehman
David Lehman
David Lehman is a poet and the series editor for The Best American Poetry series. He teaches at The New School in New York City.-Career:...
and Jim Cummins
James Cummins
James Cummins is an American poet.- Biography :Cummins teaches at the University of Cincinnati and is the curator of the Elliston Poetry Collection. He is married to the poet and art critic, Maureen Bloomfield...
, Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge is an American poet born in Providence, Rhode Island.Often associated with the Language School, his experience as a Jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects--- including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac, and movies--- often finds...
, and David Plante
David Plante
David Robert Plante is an American novelist. The son of Albina Bisson and Aniclet Plante, he is of both French-Canadian and North American Indian descent. He is a graduate of Boston College and the Université catholique de Louvain...
, among others. The critical response to Rand's collaborative work with poets has been abundant and commendatory, as in this review of his work with Creeley:
...this is utterly joyous work, natural and unlabored.... They are – thanks mostly to Rand – part fairy tales of staring cats and castle walls and, with Creeley’s poems, part brilliant condensations of real-life emotions and desires... "Robert Creeley’s Collaborations", mounted last year by the Castellani Art Museum in Niagara Falls and currently touring nationally, documents the phenomenal scope of the poet’s interests in the visual arts. Of these artists, Rand is especially compatible. The New York City artist moves freely from figurative and abstract modes, often combining the two in a single work. An artist of almost legendary energy and invention, Rand has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe.... Without at all losing individuality, Rand effortlessly evokes master draughstmen from Rembrandt and Fragonard to Matisse and Manet.... Somehow poet and painter always maintain a delicate and quite magical balance. It is a delightful performance to watch.
He has done painting series after the work of Montale, Spicer, Beckett/Eluard among others. For each collaborative project he utilizes a different visual persona, a vestige of the stylistic crucible from which he has always worked and which he sees as being consonant with his gradual invention of an unconventional Jewish iconography. This approach stimulated an engaged correspondence with the painter R.B. Kitaj. Rand’s pioneering 1989 series “The Chapter Paintings”, which dedicated one painting to each of the 54 divisions of the Hebrew Bible, instigated the groundbreaking 1996 “Too Jewish” exhibition, that originated at the Jewish Museum
Jewish Museum (New York)
The Jewish Museum of New York, an art museum and repository of cultural artifacts, is the leading Jewish museum in the United States. With over 26,000 objects, it contains the largest collection of art and Jewish culture outside of museums in Israel. The museum is housed at 1109 Fifth Avenue, in...
and traveled to other sites. As Vincent Brook saw it, “A useful date from which to mark the onset of postmodern American Jewish art is 1989. The year that saw the Tiananmen Square massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the premiere of Seinfeld was also the year Archie Rand exhibited [sic] at the Jewish Museum in New York a series of fifty-four paintings inspired by the yearly cycle of Torah readings. Jewish artists were by then no strangers to the upper echelons of the American art world, but baldly Jewish iconography was.”
His interest in Judaic narrative has been seen in numerous recent painting series, each of which is painted with novel technical and/or content approaches for example: “Sixty Paintings from the Bible” (1992), “The Eighteen” (1994), “The Seven Days of Creation” (1996), “The Nineteen” (2002) and “Had Gadya” (2005). In a review in 2005, of an exhibition of the 1994 series “The Eighteen”, Menachem Wecker wrote, “[Rand] has laid out a clearly demarcated path for others to follow. In his own way, he has effectively revolutionized the way the rest of us view Jewish art, heretofore an endangered species until Rand nurtured and raised it to fruition."
2000s
In 2003 Rand did two murals for Beth El Congregation in Fort Worth and in 2005 executed the large entrance mural at Congregation Beth-ElTemple Beth-El (San Antonio, Texas)
Temple Beth-El is a synagogue located in San Antonio, Texas. Originally founded in 1874, it is the oldest synagogue in South Texas. The current temple at the corner of Belknap and W. Ashby, just north of San Antonio Community College. Temple Beth-El is a Reform Jewish congregation, and a...
in San Antonio.
In 2004, a retrospective exhibition was mounted at the Yeshiva University Museum
Yeshiva University Museum
The Yeshiva University Museum is a teaching museum and the cultural arm of Yeshiva University. Along with the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Sephardi Foundation, the Leo Baeck Institute, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, it is a member organization of the Center for...
in New York, to very positive reviews:
I want you to try this. It is really important. Do a GoogleGoogle Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
search for 'Archie Rand: Iconoclast'-- easily the most important exhibit the Yeshiva University Museum (YUM) has ever hosted or ever will.... I will tell you who he is and why he is great.... Archie's series 'Sixty Paintings from the Bible' (1992)... takes scenes from the bible, illustrates them with Classical compositions, expressionist, almost cartoony lines, and bold pastel colors. The images contain speech bubbles that convey what the Biblical characters really said.... To Archie this playful synthesis of cartoon and Biblical stories....by creating a patchwork of different styles, the Bible works... provides a 'way of compensating for the inability of English to get at the Hebrew text' all in cartoon bubble form.... If you are up to the challenge of really trying to bridge the experiential Judaism with an aesthetic vision, then Archie Rand is the most perfect guide I know.
Writing on the occasion of the same exhibition, Richard McBee concluded:
This is it. This is the one exhibition that you must see if contemporary Jewish Art matters at all. Archie Rand has been bravely creating radical Jewish art for the last twenty years, challenging both the contemporary art establishment and the purveyors of Jewish culture. As a consequence of this insolence he has been exiled to what amounts to a critical wilderness. It is time to redeem him from exile, time for the Jewish public to take note and acknowledge the accomplishments of the foremost creator of Jewish art working today. Our cultural future depends on it.
In 2008, on a warehouse wall, Rand mounted the painting, “The 613”, which at 1700 square feet (17’ x 100’) is nearly twice the size of James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist is an American artist and one of the protagonists in the pop-art movement.-Background and education:...
’s F-111. It is one of the largest freestanding paintings ever made. Reminiscent of “The Segments” paintings it is intimidatingly enormous. Paradoxically, despite the raucous cartoony bytes that shoot colorful flashes from the manic surface, “The 613” glows warmly. Its overall effect is strangely calming and majestic. It is composed of 614 contiguous panels, each of which deals with one of the obscure but traditionally fixed number of 613 commandments, which were salvaged by sages from a literal reading of the Hebrew Bible. The viewing for “The 613” took place on one day and lasted only four hours. The event drew one thousand attendees. Menachem Wecker, describing this work in The Forward
The Forward
The Forward , commonly known as The Jewish Daily Forward, is a Jewish-American newspaper published in New York City. The publication began in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily issued by dissidents from the Socialist Labor Party of Daniel DeLeon...
, averred that “Rand’s series is arguably the most ambitious Jewish art enterprise, perhaps ever.... It is perhaps most informative to think of Rand’s efforts to visually grapple with the commandments as a neo-Maimonidean enterprise. Just as the medieval scholar wrote works that made the Bible more accessible, Rand develops an accessible visual iconography that confronts the text.... And like Maimonides, his career will surely enjoy a life after death, as yet another generation’s visual taboos become canonized in the next.”
Prompted by this showing, the art historian Matthew Baigell reflected on Rand's accomplishments in a 2009 article:
He is arguably the best known, most important, the most imaginative, and the most prolific...as well as the artist most willing to take risks....He became the most creative and outspoken proponent of a Jewish-themed art in America....He has articulated in both words and images to a greater extent than anybody else a loose-jointed attempt to assure the viability, visibility and continuity of this art.
In an article on a 2011 exhibition of Rand's "Had Gadya" series, David Kaufmann wrote
Archie Rand paints a lot, paints big, and paints complex. Since his first gallery exhibition in 1966-- when he was only 16-- he has been recognized as a prodigiously talented artist. Over three and half decades he has turned himself into one of the most important Jewish painters in America.
External links
- Archie Rand's website
- Schwabsky, Barry, Suite in Red, With Texture and Sheen”, The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, January 25, 1998. - "Collaborations with Poets Inspire Intense Freedom to Create for Archie Rand", Columbia News video; an interview with Archie Rand, filmed February 20, 2002
- Five Columbia Professors Receive Presidential Awards for Excellence in Teaching
- Wecker, Menachem. ‘Beyond Insane’ Biblical Paintings, The ForwardThe ForwardThe Forward , commonly known as The Jewish Daily Forward, is a Jewish-American newspaper published in New York City. The publication began in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily issued by dissidents from the Socialist Labor Party of Daniel DeLeon...
, June 9, 2006. - McBee, Richard. "The Painted Shul: Archie Rand and the B'nai Yosef Murals Part 2", The Jewish PressThe Jewish PressThe Jewish Press is an American weekly newspaper, geared toward the Modern Orthodox Jewish community. It describes itself as "America's Largest Independent Jewish Weekly." The newspaper has a politically conservative viewpoint and editorial policy....
, April 16, 2002. - ____________. "The Painted Shul: Archie Rand and the B'nai Yosef Murals Part 3", The Jewish PressThe Jewish PressThe Jewish Press is an American weekly newspaper, geared toward the Modern Orthodox Jewish community. It describes itself as "America's Largest Independent Jewish Weekly." The newspaper has a politically conservative viewpoint and editorial policy....
, April 22, 2002. - Kaufmann, David. "Not Kidding: Painter Archie Rand’s 10-piece Had Gadya series—now on view in Philadelphia—underscores the darkness and complexity at the heart of the Seder’s final song" TabletTablet MagazineTablet Magazine is a two-time National Magazine Award-winning online publication of Jewish life, arts, and ideas. Sponsored by Nextbook, it was launched in June 2009. Its Editor in Chief is Alana Newhouse....
, April 14, 2011.