Arnold Mesches

"I wanted to find a way to make my art serve human kind the way Honore Daumier told us about the streets of Paris, the life and foibles of its bourgeoisie, exposing their frailties with tenderness, sardonic passion and wit with soul."
- Arnold Mesches

"Arnold Mesches came of age as an artist in the mid-century when America's golden age was overshadowed by the Right's oppressive paranoia and fear of the Left. As an activist artist, Arnold chose the subversive path of being a figurative painter just as Abstract Expressionism was becoming the dominant style. Under the watchful eye of the FBI, he painted, lived, taught and loved, always keeping his focus on the larger political issues that affected the world. Arnold Mesches has continued to paint for the last 50 years and his efforts have produced a remarkable record of one artistsâ struggle to come to terms with the madness of the twentieth century."
- Gerry Snyder, Curator
Pacific Northwest College of Art,
from "Echoes: A Century Survey"

An Exhibit of selections from
Arnold Mesches,
ANOMIE 1492-2001
is currently on view at Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University

Friday, January 25, 2002 through Sunday, March 3, 2002

Press Release

"Since late 1989 Arnold Mesches has been making an imaginary timeline--paintings and collages that include overt and subtle references to the overlapping histories and multi-cultural aspects of life on our planet. In the eighteen large and lushly painted figurative works in this exhibition, Mesches conveys the profound jolt that life has in store for those who too closely follow the many and painful trials of humanity. Nothing is overt; images move and mingle freely through time, finding their place conceptually, independent of actualities. Several works presage and resonate with the tumultuous events of September 11 and the surrounding issues."
- Nina Felshin, Curator,
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery,
Wesleyan University

An Inside the Culture of Resistance interview will be conducted soon...

ARNOLD MESCHES/ECHOES: A Century Survey
by Fred Camper

REPRINTED FROM THE CHICAGO READER, February 2, 2001

Though the art world is often obsessed with newness, exaggerating or extending established styles can produce powerful and even unique results. The bold, assertive brush strokes and intense, often confining compositions of Arnold Mesches' 23 recent works at Gwenda Jay/Addington are reminiscent of German expressionism. But he also lists, among his important influences, Goya, Brueghel, Ben Shahn and Daumier.

I've seen the Brooklyn Bridge--a frequent subject in painting--rendered more lyrically and more abstractly than it is in Mesches' THE BRIDGE. But I'm not sure I've seen it look so confining. Centered on one of the towers, this symmetrical view of a walkway includes a forest of cables, adding to one's sense of a tightly constricted space. More than a formal exercise, this intense painting also shows a man with two children at the lower right, figures who seem both confined by the bridge and outside its structure, wandering members of some excluded class.

Like a number of other paintings in this handsome show, this one is based on an old family photo, the figures, Mesches told me, are his grandfather and two cousins. Born in 1923 in the Bronx, Mesches grew up mostly in Buffalo, NY, spent much of his adult life in Los Angeles and now lives in Manhattan and Puerto Rico. His father was an eastern European Jewish ŽmigrŽ and his mother the child of Jewish ŽmigrŽs. During the Depression the family fell on hard times and were forced to move; in the moving THE GOLD CHAIN, Mesches remembers his father then as a door-to-door buyer and seller of old gold and jewelry.

Visitors to Mesches' Los Angeles studio used to call him a "New York painter," but there's an oddly European feel to THE GATE, informed by Mesches' first memory of death; a child at the bottom center is dwarfed by three adult figures, a hearse, and an ornate entranceway. The scene is covered with snow, which outlines the tree branches; together, the lines of the branches, the gate, and the hearse form an almost impenetrable network, a world the child cannot hope to understand.

The exhibit is part of a much larger touring show--over 100 works--that will be presented next in April and May at the Castellani Art Museum in Niagara Falls, NY. Mesches, whose work is usually informed by history, has had a long involvement with leftist politics that began with his participation in the late-40s Hollywood strike, when he was working as a story board artist. And Howard Zinn, one of the catalog essayists, puts Mesches' work in the context of the last half century's political upheavals. But most of the works on view here focus less on class struggle than on the way the stuff of the world impinges on consciousness.

READ FOR KNOWLEDGE, a wall installation made up of one large painting flanked by 12 smaller ones, could easily be a porno essay on the power of media were it not for its 30s newsstand setting. A young boy is surrounded by pulp magazines and novels, Mesches' memory of "looking at the dirty pictures on the way to Hebrew school." All the publications, in both the powerful large painting and the exquisite smaller works, are based on old pulp covers: alongside standard detective magazines are books like LADIES FROM HADES.

Whereas the boy is the central painting is dwarfed and seemingly overwhelmed by his surroundings, the figures on the covers seem posed to best thrust bare flesh forward. Bringing the covers to colorful life, he makes his figures glow amid the darker backgrounds. By exaggerating expressionism's use of color and line, he imbues these grubby images with an intense emotional dimension: this impossible lurid world doesn't simply attract one's attention--it takes over.

Mesches uses understatement to equally powerful effect in "...because I love nice things." A billboard ad for gloves supplies the title, and two movie billboards set the scene in either the 20's or 30's. A similarly gloved young woman fronts a gas station wearing a long, deep red dress, with a bodice as bright red as her shoes. Mesches' remaining palette is darker and subdued, but almost every color has some shade of red or pink, from the sky to the vintage cars behind the figure and her pose creates the sense that all the color in the painting is flowing into her. While Mesches based the painting on an old photo of his then teen age cousin "trying to become a woman," he told me, the lone figure, standing in front of a gas station with no apparent purpose, the deserted setting, with its many commercial messages, might also be a prostitute.

Mesches' use of expressionism's subjective color, surface and line, at times exaggerating, at times understating to heighten emotion, his messy engagement with the stuff of the world, makes this a "must-see" show.