Philip Geiger began to paint interiors with figures while at Washington University in the mid-nineteen seventies. Over the next forty-eight years he became one of the most important American interpreters of a motif that first appears in ancient Roman frescoes and achieves its apotheosis in the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century. Geiger’s work strongly evokes painters like De Hooch, Terborch and Vermeer, but also vibrates with the achievements of Vuillard, Bonnard, Sickert, Hopper, and Fairfield Porter. All grows from the stimulus of earlier art and Geiger’s work exudes historical sophistication, yet the paintings are unique, his style inimitable.
The power and distinction of Geiger’s images was noted in his earliest exhibitions. After years of shows and an influential teaching career at the University of Virginia, his work has touched hundreds of younger painters, but, remarkably, has few true imitators. His manner could not be said to have generated a school, let alone any dogmatic precepts like those associated with charismatic teachers. Still, many contemporary realists find inspiration and even a kind of compass in Geiger’s achievement.
Steven Coates’ projected series of shows about Philip Geiger and his extended family among contemporary painters, young and old, offers an opportunity to admire beautiful pictures and to speculate on the stakes of his project. What, exactly, has he been up to and what do painters find so compelling? The art of painting is entangled in craft and the transmission of pictorial conventions and one’s peers have often been the best assessors of a fellow painter’s work. To that end, it might be well to survey some of Philip’s contemporaries as well as those he has challenged and inspired. Lincoln Perry, Mike Ananian, Jeffrey Carr, Elaine Wilson, Frank Galuszka, Bill Scott, Randall Exon, Susan Lichtman, Eve Mansdorf, Tim Kennedy, Doug Martenson, Mark Green, Peter Van Dyke, Aaron Thompson, John Lee, David Campbell, David Baird, and his wife and son, Elizabeth and Martin, could provide illuminating testimony and a start.
I include myself in this testimony. I’ve known Philip for fifty years and our conversations over the decades have been essential to my development. It is said artists create for a circle of ideal viewers and auditors. Geiger has fulfilled that role in my working life. I have the greatest respect for his painting, but also his thinking about painting. When we were students we developed a solidarity in our enthusiasm for earlier art. Philip loved Ingres and Vermeer and I loved Velazquez and Degas. The prestige of modernist abstraction began to wither in the nineteen seventies, but representational painting was still thought a banal activity. It was suggested that observation-based painting was a rote and uncreative pursuit. But working from life was what we pursued, starting from the pencil portraits we’d make of our classmates in our first year of school.
When we surveyed contemporary painting there were interesting fires on the horizon, Balthus, Lucian Freud, John Koch, Sidney Goodman, William Coldstream, Euan Uglow, Lennart Anderson, Gretna Campbell, George Nick, Frank Auerbach, Rackstraw Downes, Antonio Lopez, and Isabel Quintanilla, to name a few. What strikes me about this roundup is the sheer diversity of seeing embodied in a vivid painterliness. How could it be that representational paintings of shared visual circumstances could be so different and convincing at the same time?
Perhaps Philip recognized sooner than I how imaginative and abstract painting had to be to get anywhere near the beauty of the world it sought to express. Gradually, an itinerary came into view that went like this:
The visual world, everything available to the eye, has a beauty to which painting can respond.
The phenomenon we register in seeing can be understood only in relation to other bits of information such that the world is a fabric of interdependent “stuff.”
Paint is itself “stuff” which can produce equivalents for the felt fabric of sensory relations.
Powerful painting gives an account of these relations in concrete alignments. Color becomes light, closely related color becomes atmosphere, shape and geometry become space, and the surface of paint becomes a matrix from which painted reality emerges.
A description of painting this capacious allows Piero, Rubens, Renoir and Monet, Morandi and Dickinson to claim equal rights in a mysterious epistemological pursuit. Since our perceptions of the world can be measured within certain criteria, an artist is tempted to believe their accounts of visual experience escape the arbitrary promptings of desire to a safe harbor of accuracy and reason. This is almost laughably untrue and, again, Philip grasped this earlier than most representational painters.
Thinking of Philip’s pictures, I see rooms of specific color, oyster gray, salmon pink, mint green. Figures and furniture participate in the color to create an atmosphere that annexes every nameable thing to itself. Windows and doorways pierce and punctuate the color world of the room and in the openings we find alternate worlds, sometimes with a parallel series of notes in a different key. The figures found in Geiger’s interiors, at a table, talking, moving about, sometimes sleeping, though visually prominent, are made of reflected light from the windows and lamps which announce the color of the rooms they inhabit. Specific as portraits, they are often silhouettes emptied of detail and met by a reciprocal silhouette of a wall or a window. For a moment we are invited to consider whether figure or room is the painter’s generative source. Charged with psychological portent, the continuum of rooms and openings is perhaps, a metaphor for the folded corridors of mind and memory. In this sense, the picture is a mind.
For any of this pictorial magic to happen, with its transit from sensation to analogy to metaphor, something must transform a realists’ scruples about the facts into poetry. In Philip’s case, painting beautifully releases beautiful seeing. His painted surfaces are a fabric of dabs and hatches, shapes carved and cut, that reveal themselves on a slightly different schedule from the depicted figures, floors, windows and walls. Things lack pride of place in the unfolding image. The shape interval between two figures at a table is likely a pictorial verb narrating their relationship. The mosaic-like fitting of the shapes within the close color atmosphere creates a kind of compression where every moment seems significant , a continuously firing circuit of mark and image that drives the narrative. These painting qualities recall the French phrase, “la Bonne peinture.” Good painting entailed the acknowledgment of paint’s physical substance, robust concision of drawing, and precision of color. One of Philip’s early passions, Ingres, said the beauty in painting consisted of a piece of color coming upon another it most closely resembled. Philip is a natural heir of this aesthetic disposition.
Among themselves, painters have a code of professional acknowledgments, a way of assessing achievement that is so straightforward and laconic a beautiful painting can be met with a shake of the head and an exhaled expletive. This is high praise and often greets Philip’s best pictures. We’re impressed with elegant solutions to complex problems but also mad missions to say something almost unsayable. Philip has taken on many difficult painting problems like the poetic possibilities of a parking lot and the ragged edges of suburban life. Portraiture, the nude and still life have each been explored within the overarching theme of interior space, but none has ever been sentimentalized. Instead, there has been an understated commitment to the idea of invention. With artists, invention is a crucial value because it captures an intuition the world given to us demands our participation in its creation. We understand the world through our intepretations. An initial reaction to Philip’s work is usually surprise and delight, but we are also tempted to take the order, wit and clarity of the paintings for granted, as if, that’s just the way the world is. Philip’s inventiveness is of a self-effacing kind, inviting you to grasp an identity between the beauty of the paintings and the beauty of the world. It’s a gift to let us inhabit this kind of faith. Yet Philip created this space where seeing, inventing and painting merge to make a world. Steven Coates is inclined to call this ambition “the school of beauty and goodness.” Long ago I described this feeling in my own work as “the space of desire.” The important point is that Philip tends to conceal the invented nature of his world. Rooms and landscapes of the most unexpected color are directly observed while figures so precise in gesture and profile they are the soul of truth were, in fact, quite often made up. All the paintings suggest lyrical reportage while being fiction.
There is a question accompanying the work as to its poetic outcome because when the categories of observation and invention are so deeply folded together, I for one, am left with a sense of longing, a feeling the paintings have emerged to fill an absence, to repair a wound. I wonder if some of the power of Philip Geiger’s work to inspire other painters is his engagement with just this complex longing.
