"As you know, my approach to a canvas is based mainly on intuition. Nevertheless, once these vibrating lines had appeared, I thought I recognized them as presenting a parallel to my present way of life."
Boris Margo wrote to his longtime dealer and friend Betty Parsons, "My approach to a canvas is based mainly on intuition. Nevertheless, once these vibrating lines had appeared, I thought I recognized them as presenting a parallel to my present way of life."
By chance or by coincidence, my joining Lincoln Glenn Gallery coincided with the 100-year anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto. At the gallery, the celebration of this fact took the form of three surrealist exhibitions. From David Hare's menacing and lurid iterations of the myth of Cronos, to Gerome Kamrowski's fantastically biomorphic investigations, to Juanita Guccione's reveries of lived experiences, throughout the duration of the exhibits I began to understand the diverse body of work of these artists and what moved each of their creative impulses. Their impulses were often related to themes of chance, the mystery of life's creative forces, classical myths, the beauty and order found in nature, and of course the subconscious mind. The works of art that composed these exhibitions made me reflect upon the analogies, differences, and paradoxes of these themes and how the artists expressed them.
A similar automatist painting to Cave Drama, by Gerome Kamrowski: Untitled, circa 1944, oil on canvas, 35 3/4 x 47 3/4 inches.
Being in the gallery space also gave me the rare opportunity to meet and speak with scholars, critics, family and friends of the artists. This produced within me a deeper connection to the works themselves, in addition to beliefs and visions regarding history, politics, reason, logic, and the nature of the human mind. The Surrealist movement is closely related to experimentation with a series of materials and techniques. Spending time with these works of art as well as physically handling them gave me a closer perception of how the Surrealists' principles were influenced and developed by their technique, and vice versa.
Boris Margo, Cave Drama (detail), 1938, oil on canvas, 22 x 30 inches
In a broader and more practical sense, I also thought deeply about Surrealism's place in 20th Century art history, and its relationship to New York City. Through a dynamic association of ideas that occurred when several artists departed Europe of the City in the late 1930s and early 1940s, an active milieu of artists in various fields created an atmosphere of irrational invention and influence that ultimately resulted in what today are considered entirely new art historical movements. Boris Margo was one of these artists.
Image of Boris Margo.
Margo was born in 1902 in the village of Volochysk, in modern day Ukraine. Margo initially apprenticed with a clock-maker. He developed and demonstrated an early talent in painting, and was sent to art school at the Polytechnik in Odessa in 1902. In this period, with an almost complete lack of working materials, Boris Margo painted on ordinary burlap, concocting paints from homemade dyes and brushes made from cat hair and horse hair. In the early 1940s, Margo personally knew Roberto Matta, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, and Andre Breton. When Matta introduced him to Breton's manifesto, Margo realized he had been using these principles for years. Indeed, Boris Margo's approach to art through automatism began in 1927 when he received a grant to study with theorist Pavel Filonov in his Analytical School of Art. Margo also used this grant to study the work of old masters in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.
A label from Betty Parsons Gallery on the stretcher of Cave Drama.
Created only eight years after coming to the United States, and shortly before his first one man show held in 1939 at the Artists Gallery on West 8th Street, Cave Drama was painted at a moment of intense experimentation for Margo. The artists had begun dissolving celluloid for his cello cut process, as well as using decalcomania in oil painting. Margo had begun interpreting abstract swirls of paint into unrecognizable three-dimensional masses placed in a material space. In Cave Drama, vaguely anatomical elements interact within the dark environment of a cave. They expand, detach, and collide, in movements that convey a mysterious process is taking place. The individual shapes in the composition almost resemble something familiar, but remain thoroughly out of reach, evading identification. In dramatic tension between an inner and an outer world, the elements of Cave Drama could be an expression of the intangible implements of the subconscious, the unrefined original form of unborn ideas. These forms, overlapping and blending, are painted by converging and overlapping planes, making spatial understanding difficult.
Boris Margo photographed by Bernice Abbott.
At this time, Margo lived in a rundown walk-up studio in Greenwich Village. He was not yet a citizen and thus not yet eligible for WPA benefits, and the artist was not enthusiastic about providing the government agents with long questionnaires on his personal affairs, having already experienced that in Russia. Margo's most frequent visitors at this time were De Kooning, Byron Browne, and Arshile Gorky, who he assisted for six months painting WPA murals.
Boris Margo, Message I, 1964, stretched canvas over relief, 22 x 27 x 11 1/2 inches
A challenging but intensely stimulating time for the artist, Margo begins to master the means of expression that would lead him to a productive and successful career. In Cave Drama, we see Margo associate complex and delicate elements, revealing a deep understanding of the inner-workings of a phenomenon that evades comprehension. Boris Margo precisely articulates the individual parts that make up a more complex whole, parts that, not unlike a clock-maker, he appears to masterfully assemble, working together towards a higher function.
