Donald Baechler
Encyclopedia
Donald Baechler is an American artist. He attended the Maryland Institute College of Art
from 1974–77, and Cooper Union
from 1977-78. Dissatisfied with New York City
, he proceeded to the Staatliche Hochschule fuer Bildende Künste Städelschule
in Frankfurt am Main, Germany
.
"At Cooper Union
I met some German exchange students. This was 1977, and I found the whole scene at the school to be white and boring, to be honest. It wasn’t what I wanted out of art school or what I wanted out of being in New York. The most interesting minds, the most interesting talents and energy came from those German kids. And they said, 'Why don’t you come to Germany
?' The easiest school to get into was the one attached to the Frankfurt Museum. The entrance requirements were less strict, so I went with it and spent a year in Frankfurt. They were very generous."
Baechler returned to New York City
in 1980, where he was soon a part of a burgeoning Lower Manhattan
arts scene, showing in the East Village
and exhibition spaces such as Artists Space and the Drawing Center
. Baechler and Tony Shafrazi
struck up an acquaintance over a shared interest in artist Joseph Kosuth
. Shafrazi was developing an interest in graffiti-oriented works, and founded a downtown gallery that represented Baechler, Keith Haring
, Kenny Scharf
and eventually Jean-Michel Basquiat
. "He [Shafrazi] did this 180-degree about-face and opened the gallery in Soho," said Baechler in a 2000 interview, "showing Keith Haring
—whom I first met when he was a doorman at the Mudd Club
—it really surprised me. Tony
obviously had some grander vision about what was going on and decided that it wasn’t the end of conceptualism, but the beginning of something else. I never felt entirely comfortable showing my work there because it had nothing to do with what Keith
and Kenny Scharf
were doing. I wasn’t part of this downtown club scene, and I had nothing to do with so-called graffiti art." Baechler further explained, "I always used to tell people, 'I’m an abstract artist before anything else,' For me, it’s always been more about line, form, balance and the edge of the canvas—all these silly formalist concerns—than it has been about subject matter or narrative or politics."
Baechler's early work was noted for childlike imagery and thematics—associations which have recurred throughout his career. "Like Art Brut," wrote Steven Vincent
in Art in America
, "Donald Baechler's seemingly ingenuous depictions of everyday objects and simple figures succeed in large part by tapping into our nostalgia for childhood, that period of life before the rivening onset of self-consciousness and guilt. It's a myth, of course: children are hardly angelic, and alienation is the state of humanity—while Beachler's art works hard to achieve its trademark appearance of prelapsarian sincerity and artlessness."
, the New York School
, contemporary art
, folk art
, outsider art
, pop culture and childhood
. Grace Glueck of the New York Times noted "echoes of Rauschenberg
, Warhol
, Lichtenstein
," while Edward Leffingwell of Art in America
characterized Baechler's approach as "some strange and uncompromising posture out of Otterness
and Rodin
."
Holland Cotter
of the New York Times described a 1993 exhibition at Sperone-Westwater Gallery: "Mr. Baechler jams together pages from children's copy books, maps of Africa and Europe, sketches of toys (beach balls, building blocks) and the reiterated form—emphatic and phallic—of an upheld thumb. In one drawing several thumbs fill the inside of an outlined head, perhaps giving a clue to the darker undercurrents in Mr. Baechler's work as a whole. Art, like play, he seems to suggest, is just a method for keeping chaos at bay, and these days even the best-behaved child knows he's under somebody's thumb." Playing cars, fortune cookie
s, a ceramic onion, flowers, ice-cream cones, even a visual play on Mr. Bill of Saturday Night Live
, little escapes Baechler's image bank, which is a literal collection.
"I hold onto absolutely everything," said the artist. "I would guess out of every thousand images I save, I probably use one or two. I’ve never actually counted. I save images in many different forms; I save them in endless file cabinets. I have slide binders with thousands and thousands of slides that I work from. But most of the things I photograph never find their way into a painting; and most of the things I save and catalog and photocopy never really find their way into a work. It’s necessary to accumulate all of these things to get to the point of what’s important."
Widely regarded as a painter, Baechler's three-dimensional work has been correlated to the sculptural works of Roy Lichtenstein
, Alex Katz
and Carroll Dunham. Baechler has long experimented with a variety of forms and materials, always maintaining what has been dubbed his "gee-whiz approach." Alex Hawgood, in a 2008 New York Times profile, summarized: "Baechler ... is known for his sunny, multimedia work that explores the language of cultural symbols."
But Baechler's "animated, engaging and ... beautifully made" images are not without sentiment. "Baechler," wrote Edward Leffingwell of Art in America
, "scatters his surfaces with the detritus of childhood, portraying the adult today through the images of a past not quite left behind." And neither is Baechler outside the purview of art history. New York Times critic, Holland Cotter, remarked of Baechler: "At this very moment, some industrious doctoral student somewhere is documenting how thoroughly images of childhood have pervaded art of the late 1980's and early 90's. The images aren't chiefly those of adolescence, as was the case with Pop Art
in the 60's, but of infancy."
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 1974–77, and Cooper Union
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly referred to simply as Cooper Union, is a privately funded college in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States, located at Cooper Square and Astor Place...
from 1977-78. Dissatisfied with New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, he proceeded to the Staatliche Hochschule fuer Bildende Künste Städelschule
Städelschule
Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, is a contemporary fine arts academy in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.- History :The Städelschule was established by a foundation set up by the Frankfurt merchant Johann Friedrich Städel in 1817...
in Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
.
"At Cooper Union
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly referred to simply as Cooper Union, is a privately funded college in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States, located at Cooper Square and Astor Place...
I met some German exchange students. This was 1977, and I found the whole scene at the school to be white and boring, to be honest. It wasn’t what I wanted out of art school or what I wanted out of being in New York. The most interesting minds, the most interesting talents and energy came from those German kids. And they said, 'Why don’t you come to Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
?' The easiest school to get into was the one attached to the Frankfurt Museum. The entrance requirements were less strict, so I went with it and spent a year in Frankfurt. They were very generous."
Baechler returned to New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
in 1980, where he was soon a part of a burgeoning Lower Manhattan
Lower Manhattan
Lower Manhattan is the southernmost part of the island of Manhattan, the main island and center of business and government of the City of New York...
arts scene, showing in the East Village
East Village, Manhattan
The East Village is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, lying east of Greenwich Village, south of Gramercy and Stuyvesant Town, and north of the Lower East Side...
and exhibition spaces such as Artists Space and the Drawing Center
Drawing Center
The Drawing Center is a SoHo museum and the only nonprofit exhibition space in the United States to focus solely on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary.- Location and activities :...
. Baechler and Tony Shafrazi
Tony Shafrazi
Tony Shafrazi is the owner of the Shafrazi Art Gallery in New York, who deals artwork by artists such as Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, and David LaChapelle....
struck up an acquaintance over a shared interest in artist Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
. Shafrazi was developing an interest in graffiti-oriented works, and founded a downtown gallery that represented Baechler, Keith Haring
Keith Haring
Keith Haring was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s.-Early life:...
, Kenny Scharf
Kenny Scharf
Kenny Scharf is an American painter who lives in Brooklyn, New York. The artist received his B.F.A in 1980 at the School of Visual Arts located in New York City. Scharf's works consist of popular culture based shows with made up science-related backgrounds...
and eventually Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist. His career in art began as a graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s, and in the 1980s produced Neo-expressionist painting.-Early life:...
. "He [Shafrazi] did this 180-degree about-face and opened the gallery in Soho," said Baechler in a 2000 interview, "showing Keith Haring
Keith Haring
Keith Haring was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s.-Early life:...
—whom I first met when he was a doorman at the Mudd Club
Mudd Club
The Mudd Club was a TriBeCa nightclub that was opened in October 1978 by Steve Mass, art curator Diego Cortez and Anya Phillips, a figure in the downtown punk scene...
—it really surprised me. Tony
Tony Shafrazi
Tony Shafrazi is the owner of the Shafrazi Art Gallery in New York, who deals artwork by artists such as Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, and David LaChapelle....
obviously had some grander vision about what was going on and decided that it wasn’t the end of conceptualism, but the beginning of something else. I never felt entirely comfortable showing my work there because it had nothing to do with what Keith
Keith Haring
Keith Haring was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s.-Early life:...
and Kenny Scharf
Kenny Scharf
Kenny Scharf is an American painter who lives in Brooklyn, New York. The artist received his B.F.A in 1980 at the School of Visual Arts located in New York City. Scharf's works consist of popular culture based shows with made up science-related backgrounds...
were doing. I wasn’t part of this downtown club scene, and I had nothing to do with so-called graffiti art." Baechler further explained, "I always used to tell people, 'I’m an abstract artist before anything else,' For me, it’s always been more about line, form, balance and the edge of the canvas—all these silly formalist concerns—than it has been about subject matter or narrative or politics."
Baechler's early work was noted for childlike imagery and thematics—associations which have recurred throughout his career. "Like Art Brut," wrote Steven Vincent
Steven Vincent
Steven Charles Vincent was an American author and journalist. In 2005 he was working as a freelance journalist in Basra, Iraq, reporting for The Christian Science Monitor, National Review, Mother Jones, Reason, Front Page and American Enterprise, among other publications, when he was abducted and...
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...
, "Donald Baechler's seemingly ingenuous depictions of everyday objects and simple figures succeed in large part by tapping into our nostalgia for childhood, that period of life before the rivening onset of self-consciousness and guilt. It's a myth, of course: children are hardly angelic, and alienation is the state of humanity—while Beachler's art works hard to achieve its trademark appearance of prelapsarian sincerity and artlessness."
Art and Context
Baechler's source material draws broadly on classical art historyArt history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
, the New York School
New York School
The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City...
, contemporary art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
, folk art
Folk art
Folk art encompasses art produced from an indigenous culture or by peasants or other laboring tradespeople. In contrast to fine art, folk art is primarily utilitarian and decorative rather than purely aesthetic....
, outsider art
Outsider Art
The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut , a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.While...
, pop culture and childhood
Childhood
Childhood is the age span ranging from birth to adolescence. In developmental psychology, childhood is divided up into the developmental stages of toddlerhood , early childhood , middle childhood , and adolescence .- Age ranges of childhood :The term childhood is non-specific and can imply a...
. Grace Glueck of the New York Times noted "echoes of Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
, Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
, Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...
," while Edward Leffingwell of 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...
characterized Baechler's approach as "some strange and uncompromising posture out of Otterness
Tom Otterness
Tom Otterness is an American sculptor whose works adorn parks, plazas, subway stations, libraries, courthouses and museums in New York---most notably in Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City and in the 14th Street/8th Avenue subway station---and other cities around the world...
and Rodin
Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...
."
Holland Cotter
Holland Cotter
Holland Cotter is an art critic with the New York Times. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Cotter was born in Connecticut and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his A.B. from Harvard College in 1970, where he studied English literature under poet Robert Lowell and was an...
of the New York Times described a 1993 exhibition at Sperone-Westwater Gallery: "Mr. Baechler jams together pages from children's copy books, maps of Africa and Europe, sketches of toys (beach balls, building blocks) and the reiterated form—emphatic and phallic—of an upheld thumb. In one drawing several thumbs fill the inside of an outlined head, perhaps giving a clue to the darker undercurrents in Mr. Baechler's work as a whole. Art, like play, he seems to suggest, is just a method for keeping chaos at bay, and these days even the best-behaved child knows he's under somebody's thumb." Playing cars, fortune cookie
Fortune cookie
A fortune cookie is a crisp cookie usually made from flour, sugar, vanilla, and oil with a "fortune" wrapped inside. A "fortune" is a piece of paper with words of faux wisdom or a vague prophecy...
s, a ceramic onion, flowers, ice-cream cones, even a visual play on Mr. Bill of Saturday Night Live
Saturday Night Live
Saturday Night Live is a live American late-night television sketch comedy and variety show developed by Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol. The show premiered on NBC on October 11, 1975, under the original title of NBC's Saturday Night.The show's sketches often parody contemporary American culture...
, little escapes Baechler's image bank, which is a literal collection.
"I hold onto absolutely everything," said the artist. "I would guess out of every thousand images I save, I probably use one or two. I’ve never actually counted. I save images in many different forms; I save them in endless file cabinets. I have slide binders with thousands and thousands of slides that I work from. But most of the things I photograph never find their way into a painting; and most of the things I save and catalog and photocopy never really find their way into a work. It’s necessary to accumulate all of these things to get to the point of what’s important."
Widely regarded as a painter, Baechler's three-dimensional work has been correlated to the sculptural works of Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...
, Alex Katz
Alex Katz
Alex Katz is an American figurative artist associated with the Pop art movement. In particular, he is known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints and is represented by numerous galleries internationally.-Life and work:...
and Carroll Dunham. Baechler has long experimented with a variety of forms and materials, always maintaining what has been dubbed his "gee-whiz approach." Alex Hawgood, in a 2008 New York Times profile, summarized: "Baechler ... is known for his sunny, multimedia work that explores the language of cultural symbols."
But Baechler's "animated, engaging and ... beautifully made" images are not without sentiment. "Baechler," wrote Edward Leffingwell of 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...
, "scatters his surfaces with the detritus of childhood, portraying the adult today through the images of a past not quite left behind." And neither is Baechler outside the purview of art history. New York Times critic, Holland Cotter, remarked of Baechler: "At this very moment, some industrious doctoral student somewhere is documenting how thoroughly images of childhood have pervaded art of the late 1980's and early 90's. The images aren't chiefly those of adolescence, as was the case with Pop Art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
in the 60's, but of infancy."
External links
- Donald Baechler Official Website
- Ajax Press (Books by Baechler)
- Cheim & Read Gallery
- Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery
- Galleri Lars Bohman
- Alain Noirhomme Gallery
- Tony Shafrazi Gallery
- Pace Prints
- Locks Gallery
- Artnet
- Art Signature Dictionary, genuine signature by the artist Donald Baechler Here are eight dated examples of Donald Baechler's signature and monogram.