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To make the extraordinary output and variety of modern artists comprehensible and manage- able, art historians have of necessity accepted a form of historical triage: a few "innovators" must suffice to exemplify, chronologically, the barrage of "isms." It is sobering, however, to consider the many worthy artists whose achievements are ultimately overwhelmed by the time, taste, numbers, and focus on "pure" stylistic forms. Therefore, I have always found it historically proper and personally satisying to explore artistic careers that incorporate both innovation and continuity, that create new forms and techniques along with variations on existing ones, that strike distinctly individual chords within the stylistic context of their times. Encompassing over forty years of recognized creative achievement, the art of Boris Margo exemplifies such a career. From the late 1930's to the mid-1960's in particular, Margo's art was highly respected and exhibited regularly in important shows. For example, "Abstract & Surrealist Art in America," orgainized by Sidney Janis in 1944, represented Margo's art, as did the Chicago Art Institute's 1947 show on a similar theme, "Abstract and Surrealist American Art." At Peggy Guggenheim's famous "Art of This Century" gallery, Margo was included in a special collage exhibition.
It is because Margo has been a tireless, even compulsive, experimenter that his technical and formal devices must be carefully studied in the context of contemporary styles. Like many artists of his generation, his imagery proceeded along a path of gradual change from naturalistic surrealism, to surrealism loosely based on organic forms, to a semi-abstract blending of shapes and atmospheric hazes, to total abstraction. Within each of these phases, however, Margo's sources, imagery, and techniques differed significantly from other American surrealists and abstractionists, and often were produced with one of Margo's experimental processes. Margo's work of the 1930's - whether the early pictures of precisely drawn though oddly juxtaposed figures, faces, and objects, or the amorphous creatures and landscapes seemingly in varying states of transformation and decay from the end of the decade - could logically be presumed to derive directly from the well-known coterie of European surrealists, including Dali, Ernst, Tanguy, and others. However, Margo's use of fantasy and technical curiosity was grounded in art theory that paralleled the classic forms of surrealism. Born in Russia, Margo lived there until 1929. From 1927-29, Margo was one of a group of students who maintained contact with Pavel Filonov, a teacher who had been forced to leave the offical art Academy in Leningrad due to his radical approach to art. To Filonov, art was a result of opposing objective and subjective forces, such as intellectual analysis and intuition. He also stressed spontaneity of imagery and technique; fantasy and abstraction were encouraged. Biological and scientific concepts were to be integrated with the individual's artistic imagintion. (Margo's tendency toward semi-abstraction evoked by natural and scientific phenomenoa may be partially attributed to his exposure to this aspect of Filinov's thought.)
In the early 1930's, this new emigre became closely associtated with another foreign-born artist who would, like Margo, later merged personal visions of nature with organic surrealist techniques to create an individual style. This was Arshile Gorky, for whom Margo worked as an apprentice. Gorky, while searching for his own pictorial idiom, worked through long periods of self-imposed "apprenticeships" himself, copying and making variations on the styles of Cezanne, Picasso, and others. Margo started studying work by artists who interested him as well - in particular, the European surrealists Ernst, Tanguy, and Dali - as they began to make their mark on the American art world through exhibitions at the Julien Levy Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art's "Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism" show of 1936. The former two artists, and Ernst especially, captured Margo's eye. Paradoxically, Margo's pictures made just after his arrival in America, with densely packed figures derived from memories of Russian peasants and scenerey and images reminiscent of Old Master paintings Margo may have seen or studied in Russia, are more personal "surreal" statements than those from the latter half, which are more dependant on birds, strange vegetation and other Ernst motifs. Curiously, while mixing his own imagery with that other fantasists, Margo had nevertheless succeeded in devloping a "surrealist" technical procedure for which, until later research indicated otherwise, Ernst had been given credit for using first. This was the technique of applying decalcomania (the transference of a liquid medium by contact and pressure from one surface to another) to oil painting, and more specifically, employing it to create the crusty-looking textures, as seen in the spongy rock outcroppings and moldering beasts that inhabit paintings by Margo and Ernst. It now weems that Margo's oil paint decalcomania occurred as early as 1934, whereas Ernst first used it about 1939.2
Each brushstroke, each contact with the picture, is a precise recording through the material and in the material of the inner psychical process taking place in the artist, and the whole work is a recording of the intellect of the person who made it. Art is the reflection through material or the record in material of the struggle for the formation of man's higher intellectual condition. . . .3It is to Margo's own credit, however, that he was able to so consistently work out visually coherent expressions with these experiments. This conceptual nimbleness in suiting material to situation stood Margo in good stead in his first years in America. Unable to afford most art supplies immediately upon his arrival date, Margo took to clipping photographs out of magazines and created complex collages, teeming with imagery. He made a virtue out of modest materials again in his series of scratchboard pictures, remarkable for their scrupulous, veristic technique achieved in a medium usully reserved for children's drawings for reasons of economy and simplictity. In the late 1930's and early 1940's, Margo was among those advanced American artists who, via the impetus of Matta and others, were producing biologially inspired imagery with freely applied automatist processes of paint-handling. These images gradually became more abstract, with the objects losing their solidity, merging into diaphanous veils of light. Once more, Margo emerges stylistically as an individual maintaining a personal direction within a wider aesthetic context. The 1940's were transitional years for many American artists. Some abandoned the biomorphic outlines and attenuated spatial webs of organic surrealism for completely non-reprensentational art; among these were artists now considered abstract expressionists: Mark Rothko, Robert Motherhwall, and Barnett Newman, for example. But other artists retained some sort of imagery, however vague, that was drawn from the artits' perceptions, visual or emotional, of nature. It is important to note that this orientation toward nature was purposeful, a decision by each artist that the retention of a natural subject, no matter how elusive in form, was a positive statement attuned to their own inner vision. Such art was not reactionary in comparison to abstract expressionism; it was simply different. Moving back and forth between lesser an greater degrees of abstraction as was seen fitting for each picture, exponents of this approach included Margo, Charles Slilger, Peter Busa, Jimmy Ernst, Gerome Kamrowski, Ralph Rosenburg and many others. Natural phenomena were sparking-off points for these artists. As Margo stated, a given source was "no more than . . . the initiating stimulous, coming from the physical and emotional environment," allowing the final painting to "paraphrase nature, lead an independent existence, become a new entity."4 Apart from this general taste for nature as a source, Margo soon added a related subject to his repertoire: Science. As it represents humanity's perception, understanding, and modification of natural processes, science was a logical extention of Margo's visual and intellectual interests. Light, as a motif, underwent an intriguing transformation that reveals this shift in approach. Paintings from the 1930's usually displayed light of a dim, ominous, crepuscular sort, setting the grim look of Margo's monster ridden landscapes. These paintings, greatly influenced by those of Bosch and Brueghel, also had jets of flame-like light bursting forth from caves or punctured creatures. These rays became prominent objects in their own right in the late 1930's and early 1940's, resembling comets. Then light started to diffuse in lambent, spectrally glowing fogs, like auroras. By the mid-1940's, his work presented solid structures emanating light - hybrid conformations referring to mchanical or scientific aparatus, radar antennae, glass tubing, even the curving structural forms prevalent in science-fiction illustration.
Margo's restless experimentaion had led to a remarkable range in material and formats used. Paintings using oil, oil monotype, decalcomania, and other automatist processes were produced in standard shapes, as well as extreme verticals mounted as scrolls in the orintal manner, and miniatures including works less than two inches square. Some of these latter pieces were affixed to metallic pins. Margo's early experience with using inexpensive or scrap materials gave rise to sculptures made of driftwood, some with attached objects or coated with plastic. In fact, it was the fortuitous discovery of some discarded celluloid that led to what is perhaps the best-known of Margo's technical innovations: the cellocut, which Margo developed in 1936. Intrigued by the sheet of celluloid, Margo wrote to the product's manufacturer, Du Pont, to ascertain its properties. The company not only responded, but also sent Margo some acetone, which dissolves celluloid. After some initial manipulation of the material, including using a squeeze bottle for ketchup as an applictor for the liquid celluloid, Margo perfected the cellocut process, which he described thus: The graphic process which I have named cellocut is , briefly, the utilization of a new varnish which is a liquid type of plastic material consisting of sheet celluloid dissolved in acetone. If this varnish is dissolved to pouring consitency, any smooth surface such as Prestwood, copper, brass, aluminum or zinc sheets can be coated with it and, after the varnish has set, worked with etching or woodcut tools. A thicker solution may then be applied to form a heavier raised surface if this is desired for the finished result. Plates made with this varnish may be either intaglio or surface printed. . . . Experimentation with the medium itself, or in combination with mordants and other grapic techniques constantly leads to new possibilities and new problems.6 Through variations on the cellocut, printmaking became the medium for Margo's most prolific experimentation. For unique textural effects, the plastic medium could be incised, softened, and extended; it could be printed in conjuntion with other graphic processes, such as soft-ground etching; it could be embedded with material and objects to form high embossments. Two retrospectives that Margo has had honored his graphic art; shows at the Brooklyn Museum in 1974 and Syracuse University in 1968 were devoted to printmaking only. In the context of contemporary American art, Margo's printmaking constituted a significant contribution to biomorphic imagerey , and its subtle color modulations were quite in keeping with tendencies toward color field abstraction in the 1940's. The built-up plastic surface of the cellocut led, given Margo's experimental impulse, to increasingly sculptural applications of the method. After printing cellocut imagery onto paintings, so that these works were really a cross between monotype and painting, Margo hit upon the idea of using the thick printing plates themselves as the basis of bas-reliefs. Edge of the City, 1955, is a powerful image of interlocking geometric shapes and more linear elements made simply of aluminum pressed onto a cellcut surface on plywood. Interplanetary, from the same year, presents a delicate web of aluminum resembling dissected radio telescopes or schematic tragectories. It also resembles some of the imagery of Margo's purely sculptural experiments of the 1950's, which emphasized highly attenuated structures of joined, thin linear elements. Revealing Margo's intuitive, ad hoc approach to media, these spindly assemblages were formed of wire armatures covered with aluminum foil and dipped in liquid Sculpmetal. Some of these sculptures suggested electrical power transmission lines; other were decidely shaped like bizarre insects.
Thus, Margo's entire career was that of an independent thinker and maker of objects which were occasionally ahead of their times, but which often interpreted them with a specical, inventive twist or personal resonance. Margo has said that "what makes a painting or print unified is the integration of (1) the approach from nature, (2) the forgetting of nature as one proceeds, (3) the return to life, or the original idea base on nature."7 This almost metaphysical approach is seen to great advantage in his paintings of the late 1950's and 1960's. Subtle, lyrical abstractions paralleling the more single-mindedly non-objective color abstractions for which other artists of the era are known, these works by Margo seemingly strive to depict poetic essences of nature and light. That such a rarefied approach can be succesful in its aims is validated by positive reviews of the work such as the following: The formal means of these paintings - nervous, threaded lines of color that have the look of graphs of sound waves and vibrations - are carried from paint to painting with a knowledgeable variety and conistent painterliness. In From Meteor Paths vapor trails of intense reds, yellows and whites streak upward in a vertical expanse, in Photic Concord the hovering pale greens and blues shift and change like the play of an aurora borealis. In Intervals. . .a night of deep blues is punctuated by bands of silvery white.8 Such absorption and participation by the observer certainly should have pleased Margo, and marked as valid his personal vision of the subject matter of art. Intensely individualized bodies of work such as Margo's due to their very individuality, tend to be unfairly shifted aside by the wider sweep of traditional art history. Yet it is such work, I believe, that deepens and enriches the art styles of an era, especially the modern era. For their inherent aesthetic qualities, which also record the important human trait of diversity of expression, these works are well worth noting. And Boris Margo's art, exemplifying an accomplished career of individuality in context, is well worth remembering. Jeffrey Wechsler is the Assistant Director of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ
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From 1947 to 1962, Betty Parsons represented Margo at her prestigious gallery. These showings demonstrate how Margo's art was accepted within the most high powered venues of surrealism and abstract expressionism, the two styles to which Margo's art is most directly linked. Margo's technique and imagery, however, are results of both intermittent parallels to, and variations on these styles.
Despite his visibility, his many technical innovations, and the praise of his peers, - and because Margo did not "invent" surrealism or abstract expressionism - Margo has suffered from the historical triage that descended upon mid-20th-century American art. Two personal anecdotes should serve to make a point about the strange state of limbo, of simultaneous respect and neglect, of Margo's reputation. In 1987, I was discussing lesser-known individuals whose work was contemporary with aspects of abstract expressionism with an eminent historian of the style, Irving Sandler. I had mentioned a few names of nearly forgotten artists, when Dr. Sandler suggested, unprompted, "What about Boris Margo?" I was pleased and surprised to find that such a positive impression of Margo's work had remained with this important art historian. Yet this brief mention of Margo also reminded me of my research ten years earlier for an exhibition, "Surrealism and Americn Art: 1931-1947," for which I wanted to locate work by Margo. Many gallery owners, art historian, curators and artists active in th 1940's and 1950's remebered Margo and his art quite well. None, however, knew where I might locate the artist, or indeed, if he were still living. Stymied, I fell back on my resource of last resort: the Manhattan telephone directory. Listed therein was Boris Margo, and I soon was visiting a gracious, talented man, soft-spoken and modest about his accomplishments. Margo's modesty gives this anecdote part of its relevance: the artist has never been an active promoter of his own work. The discovery and public recording of his technical innovations were left to others; the artist's only interest was creating and experimenting.
Filonov's interest in personal expression, emotional content, and the subconcious led to an imaginative, "surreal" approach to subject matter. Just as significant for Margo was the impetus for new ways of developing an image, mentally and physically. According to Filonov's ideas, ". . . the creative process moved from dot to line, from line to form, and then from form to object and then finally object to the essential subject. The ultimate result was not necessarily a reconizable form, but an expression of the inner spirit. The significance is not so much the intriguing parallel to the philosophy of the surrealists, but the working procedure and the enthusiasm for which it provided release."1 Thus, upon Margo's arrival in the United States in 1930, his backround already permitted him to create fantastic, surreal imagery before surrealism became widely known or accepted by artists in this country.
This is only the first instance of Margo's incessant technical experimentation, a hallmark of Margo's art traceable in part to Filonov's teaching, with its emphasis on spontaneity and the linkage of manipualtion of materials with intellectual creativity:
Astronomy, biology, physics, new technologies - these were among the sources that Margo drew his inspiration from. And the word "from" should be emphasized, for the title of Margo's works often begin with it: From Meteor Paths, From Rock Forms, From Magnetic Filings, From Thoughts of Alchemy, and the like. This system indicates that the picture so named is not a literal transcription of an object or process, but a visual evocation aroused in the artist's psyche through contemplation of the subject. Margo did not find much reason for giving titles to modern pictures, for he believed that a title "confuses the viewer and prevents him from seeing with his own eyes"5 Indeed, most of Margo's titles were not of his doing; his wife, the artist Jan Gelb, usally created them. After a painting was made, she or another observer would question Margo as to what the image meant. If Margo said the ultimate source was, for example, aerodynamic engineering and the modern shapes used for efficient flight, the title arose: From Airplane Contours. This division of labor well suited Margo; he was free to experiment, to invent.
Works such as Interplanetary, in which a printing plate is removed from its original practical context, receives an application of oil paint, and is then hung vetically as an art object, are fascinating blends of prinmaking, sculpture, and painting. (Margo's innovative usage of these plates anticipates, to some degree, Frank Stella's integration of the printing plates used for his graphic art into his huge three-dimentional wall constructions of the 1980s.) But perhaps Margo's most extraordinary examples of experimentation, of sheer material transformation, even whimsy, are his sculptures in the round combining three-dimentional forms, stretched canvas, painting, cellocut, and found objects - including, of all things, seating units.
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