5 October 2004
Bruce Jackson
Breverman as Impresario, Breverman as Jew
(Written for Harvey Breverman: Humanist Impulses, the catalog accompanying the exhibit of the same name, University at Buffalo Art Galleries, October 1-December 31, 2004)
Time, space and memory
Whenever I see a great deal of Harvey Breverman’s work at one time I recall what is perhaps the most frequently quoted line from the works of William Faulkner. It occurs in Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner’s most historical novel, and it is spoken by the lawyer Gavin Stevens, the character who is perhaps as close to a mouthpiece as Faulkner ever wrote: "The past is never dead," Gavin Stevens says. "It’s not even past."
Likewise all objects that are given form by Harvey Breverman’s vibrant and resonant visual imagination. Everything stays in play. Objects and persons imagined and remembered are as present and substantial as objects and persons seen at the moment the crayon touches the paper.
I’ve read articles in which Breverman is described as an important Realist artist. I don’t understand that. Real objects and real people populate his works, but the only thing real (unless you count the imagination as real, which those critics do not) about the works is the works themselves—the piece of paper or canvas so many inches wide and so many inches high. Harvey only pretends to obey the ordinary rules of space, and he never obeys the rules of time and physics we count on to maintain our balance in life. In Harvey's world, things lurk and hover and impend. A single object or person may inhabit different places and states, and multiple objects and persons may occupy the same space at the same time.
Memory is a major character in Breverman’s art and, like the memory that serves us imperfectly every day, it is never complete or fully reliable. The fact that you can remember something doesn’t mean that it happened; it means only that you remember it, which for most of us is one of memory’s most troublesome limitations. For Harvey, I suspect, that is memory’s unending delight and potential. The objects of his memory are constantly reconfiguring themselves rather than bleaching into unintelligibility or nothingness. Images of a page or a room or a cityscape or a face hover, come into the foreground, recede into bare outline, achieve what seem to be full final form, and then reconstitute themselves or recombine with other images and figures in entirely new congeries of the imagination.
It’s not that the real isn’t here; it surely is. I see in Harvey’s drawings and paintings people who have been Harvey’s friends, and mine, over the past thirty-five years. Some are not far from where he and I now live. Some have moved on to other places on this earth. Some have died. Memory and art are the last places you die and the appearances of these people in Harvey’s drawings and paintings keep memory alive longer than we who have memories, and in a different way than we who have memories. Memories are ever-changing, but art is specific, fixed. Art, like words that have been said, can never been undone or taken back; art and words that have been said can only be followed.
None of which is to say that Harvey’s art is nostalgic. It isn’t. Nostalgia is the memory of an incomplete experience, and Harvey’s art is about experience that is ever in the present. Completion or incompletion have nothing to do with it. Those bits and pieces of the recent and remote past he hauls into present consciousness are meaningful not because of what they were then, but because the space they occupy in his sensibility—and potentially in ours—now.
Words
Harvey can, and will when asked to, explain where everything in every one of his pictures comes from, but I’m not sure in doing that he will be telling you what you need to know. Often you may do as well on your own, which is what I think he expects and wants of you anyway. That is perhaps why he almost never identifies by name any of the characters in his larger works, no matter how famous they are or how loaded with meaning their names are. His drawings and paintings are works of and for the eye; they are not visual name-dropping.
I asked him, for example, about the figures in his 1992 painting “Green Book of Aragon II.” The primary figure, dominating much of the left side of the image, is a man on a stool, seen in perfect profile. In the center, another man, seen from behind, sits on a different kind of stool, paint brushes in his left hand. With his right hand he seems to paint on a canvas. To his right and in front of the canvas, a third man sits in a director’s chair, looking to the right and out of the frame. In the right foreground a dwarf priest walks toward the center, holding in his left hand a green book.
The book is the only green thing in that entire large painting. The rest the canvas is drenched in blue. The man with the brushes wears a blue vest and blue shirt. The shirt and trousers of the man to his right and the chair the man sits in are all blue. The dwarf is dressed in a blue-black cassock. The trousers and shirt of the man on the left are blue; his grey hair is highlighted with pale blue. What may be a fusebox in a distant room is blue, as is the floor in that room. The wallpaper of the studio is blue. The shadows on all the skintones and on the painter’s khakis are blue. The polychrome carpet has blue in it. The only objects in the painting that are not entirely or partly blue are the wood of the two stools and the chair, the shoes and sweater of the man on the left, the wall of the distant room—and the green book carried by the dwarf.
“That’s Jack Peradotto on the left,” I said.
“Yes,” Harvey said. “That’s Jack.” John Peradotto—“Jack” to everyone who knows him—is a classicist on the University at Buffalo faculty. We’ve all known one another for decades.
I asked Harvey who the man on the right was. He told me. It was someone I didn’t know.
“And that’s you in the middle, painting and holding the brushes.”
“Yes,” he said, “that’s me.”
“But, Harvey: you’re painting on the back of the canvas, not the front of it.”
“Yes,” he said, “I am.”
“Why are you painting on the back of the canvas?”
“You’re seeing me from behind so you might as well see the painting from behind.”
“Ah,” I said. He didn’t offer any further explanation, so then I said, “And the dwarf. Who’s the dwarf?”
“Him? He’s from my imagination.”
“And the book he’s carrying?”
“That’s the Green Book of Aragon. That was the Grand Inquisitor’s book that contained the named of the Jews who were to be converted.”
Almost. The Green Book of Aragon contained the names of Jews in Aragon who had converted to Christianity. For a reason no one now seems to know, the Aragon Council in 1622 ordered all existing copies of it burned in the plaza of the Zaragoza Market. Only four copies are known to have survived. One of them—or one of the ones that was burned in 1622—is carried by Harvey Breverman’s dwarf.
UB’s English Department of Legend
If you spend much time around Buffalo you’re almost certain to hear tell of the legendary English department that existed at University at Buffalo in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies. Like a lot of legends, there’s some truth to those stories and a good deal of imaginative reconstruction. It’s true that Al Cook, who chaired the English department in those years, assembled in a very short time a spectacular faculty. But it’s also true that many of the people who were part of the scene that is imagined so fondly weren’t in the English department at all, and some weren’t even faculty members of UB but were rather friends or working associates of people who were. Furthermore, the UB English Department of legend took place over time, not all at once. People came and went; some were here briefly, some were here early and some were here late. The UB English Department of Legend is more of an idea than a fact.
What happened here in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies wasn’t a department, but a dynamic cultural scene and an extended process, and there is only one place it really does exist: in the work of Harvey Breverman. In Breverman’s pictures you find dozens of the people who populated that scene and process : Michel Serres, Olga Bernal, René Girard and Raymond Federman in French (Federman would later move into the English department); John Sullivan and Jack Peradotto in Classics; Larry Chisholm in American Studies; Al Cook, Homer Brown, Robert Creeley, John Barth, Diane Christian, J.M. Coetzee, and Dwight Macdonald in English. And the visitors and friends and colleagues: Robert Duncan, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Foucault, Ruthven Todd, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Jim Dine and so many others.
Harvey has favorites among those writers and artists who provided much of the ambience in which he worked and flourished for so many years, and he has his favorites among his images of them. The same image of Michel Serres appears alone, in a group in Buffalo, and in Paris with Michel Foucault and Samuel Beckett. Beckett appears again and again, once facing Breverman, who is wearing a sixteenth century Venetian Commedia dell’Arte Zanni mask. Robert Creeley appears frequently in these images, not only in Buffalo where he lived and worked, but in Harvey’s imagination of him in the Nightwork Series in “Creeley with Masoretic Notes” (1999). Harvey likewise puts a yarmulke on John Coetzee in “Coetzee in Prague” (1994); he makes Allen Ginsberg a panel in “Ginsberg Among the Geniza” (1991); and he surrounds John Barth with fragments of manuscripts in “Brevarium Judaicum” (1999). The Masoretic notes are early first millennium commentaries to the scholarly Hebrew text; the Geniza are among the earliest texts of the Hebrew Bible; the Brevarium Judaicum is a fourteenth century Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur prayer book. Harvey’s modern writers are painted into another time, space and language; his masters of words are surrounded by thousand-year-old texts that cannot be read.
FedermanOther than Harvey himself, Raymond Federman is the artist who appears in more contexts than any anyone else in Harvey’s recent works. Federman made his academic bones writing about Samuel Beckett, another frequent subject of Breverman, but for most of the past forty years he has been writing fiction, most of it about his coming to terms with the loss of his family in the Holocaust. He has been part of Breverman’s academic, social and artistic circle for much of that time.
And, to go by these drawings and paintings, part of his imagination. Federman appears suave in a trenchcoat in “Interior: Studio Group II” (1991) and “Interior: Studio Group III” (1994). He hovers like a spirit over the roofs of Paris seen from an attic hotel room in “Federman (Rue Jacob)” (2003). In “Contemplating Paris II” (2003), Federman looks out of the frame to the left and Breverman looks upward and to the right; behind them are faint outlines of Parisian rooftops; in the foreground are three right hands, each holding a pencil. In “Federman: Broken Epitaph” (2000), Federman’s grinning face hovers under characters from a Hebrew book, with circles, like the end of something cylindrical pressed into the physical surface of the picture. Below the characters and circles is a prosthetic arm, its claw sitting on the table and harness going off into unintelligibility to the right. In “Kol Nidre Elegy” (1999), Federman is on his back, grinning, surrounded by blackness like the grave, wearing a striped shirt that has just enough colors in it not to be a concentration camp shirt—but not so many colors that you won’t think of a concentration camp shirt.
Kol Nidre is the first prayer sung by the cantor on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. It is a prayer about the annulment of vows and oaths. It is a prayer about connections made, connections broken, and about starting over. What is Ray Federman doing on his back, his head and shoulders in black, surmounted by a green frame with ancient Hebrew characters in “Kol Nidre Elegy?” Who is being mourned in that elegy?
“The Block I”The answer is perhaps in an earlier work, the 2002 pastel, “The Block I,” which has three and a half figures of persons in it and one building. The building might be a factory; it also might be a crematorium in a concentration camp. The lines of the building are clinical and precise; they might have been drawn with a ruler. Blurred smoke rises from and partly obscures rectangular chimneys in the background. Yes, I think it is a crematorium in a concentration camp.
Leslie Fiedler, the late literary critic who was part of the intellectual spine of UB’s humanities faculty for forty years, is on the right side of the frame, looking toward but not at the building. His left hand is raised, moving more deeply into the picture. Federman looks to the right, out of the frame entirely. Raymond is dressed in a striped jacket—perhaps like that of a prisoner.
Both Raymond and Leslie wrote about the Holocaust, but for Leslie it was one subject among many while for Raymond it has forever been at the core of his fictional work.
The third figure is Harvey himself, wearing a turtleneck like so many of his drawings of Beckett, and the Venetian Zanni mask with its large hooked nose pushed up atop his head. That mask turns up frequently in his recent work, almost always on his own face or head. In his hand, the figure that is Harvey holds not a sketchbook or canvas but rather a mirror. Harvey told me that the figure in the mirror is himself, but if that is true it is himself in another time, another place, for the faint, partial figure in the mirror doesn’t match the man with the hooked-nose Zanni mask at all.*
So there are three Jews and a Blakean Emanation of one of them, positioned around a building that might very well be the crematorium in a concentration camp. Not one of the figures—not Harvey, not Leslie, not Raymond—confronts the building or its smoking chimneys directly.
But you and I who look at the painting, we have no choice but to look at the building with its smoking chimneys directly. You and I: if we look at the painting, we have to look at the building, with its smoking chimneys, directly.
Jew thingsSome of the drawings and paintings are full of barely intelligible or unintelligible but just recognizable Hebrew characters. But Breverman’s Jewish symbolism isn’t simply the iconography of Jewish things tucked into or around images with which they have nothing to do. They carry with them everything, from the mysteries of the Kabbalah to the horrors of the gas chambers and ovens to the pleasures of the family seder. It is no accident that one of his favorite faces is that of Raymond Federman, whose family was vaporized by the Nazis and who has spent his entire adult life coming to terms with the nearly unbearable fact that he alone of all of them is still alive.
All of this becomes explicit in“The D.P. I” a 2002 pastel, the title of which is a pun. For any American Jew of Harvey’s age, the initials “D.P.” denotes the refugees from Europe who came to America after World War II, the newly-arrived East European Jews who had no home to return to, many of whom arrived here knowing little or no English, the Displaced Persons. In Europe, the initials “D.P.” had far greater meaning: all those millions of people of whatever nationality or ethnicity who had been made homeless by the war. But to Harvey “D.P.” also has meaning specific to his place in Buffalo: it is his rank in State University of New York. He is a SUNY Distinguished Professor, the highest academic rank in the university system. Harvey is a D.P.
In this picture, he draws himself wearing the striped uniform of a concentration camp prisoner, his face gaunt. Hanging from the prisoner Harvey’s neck is the medal the professor Harvey was awarded at the official ceremony promoting him to his present university rank.
There are two disjunctions in the piece occurring about the horizontal line that runs across it two-thirds of the way down. The line is formed by a tear: Harvey started the picture, ripped it in two, drew on each part, then taped them back together again.
Below that line formed by the tear, the stripes of the prisoner’s uniform blur and all but disappear; Harvey’s D.P. medal rests on that blurred field. And the arm with which the gaunt Harvey draws is detached from the body of the prisoner D.P. above the line. The arm comes not from the shoulder or trunk, but rather straight from the heart.
The camps and the thousands of years of history haunt him; they are ever in his present. “Prague: Tefillin” (2003) has his face at lower right, phylacteries on his forehead. Above him, a street in a circle, as in a mirror, and some vague buildings. Above all that an arm, straight out, tefillin wrapped as in prayer. And just above it a large small-windowed factory with a chimney. A factory or a death camp blockhouse? Of course it is a death camp blockhouse. And “Sacrifice,” done the same year, has Harvey’s face twice, once in rear profile and once straight on, both wearing phalacteries, while to the right an angel halts the sacrifice of a lamb and two figures pray against a field of barely discernible Hebrew characters.
In Harvey’s world, all those poets and painters and friends, here and elsewhere, living and dead, can sit in the same room, around the same table, appear in the same mirror, be there while the dwarf of the imagination passes by carrying the Green Book of Aragon. Who knows but that you, too, will one day experience a surprising conversion or see the dwarf, walking by, carrying that book or another? The lesson at the heart of Harvey’s images is that all remains.
*A note on Harvey’s mirrors
Many of Harvey’s pictures have mirrors, but they never quite behave as we expect they should. In “The Block I”, the figure with the Commedia dell’Arte Zanni mask holds a mirror, but it shows an image reversed that isn’t quite him anyway. There are three mirrors in “The Studio VII” (1987), which has Douglas Schultz (then the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) in the director’s chair in which Harvey frequently depicts him and someone else to his left. Mirrors to the left of the man on the left and another to the right of Schultz show the backs of each man’s head. But both men are looking toward the left, so the mirrors should show the right sides of their faces, not the backs of their heads, and the mirror with the back of Schultz’s head is not his head anyway: it is a different shirt, different hair. The jackets of the man on the left and the man in the mirror aren’t quite the same, and neither are their bald spots. Only the center mirror seems to tell us true: it reflects a cylindrical device atop some books in front of Schultz and, beyond that, part of an artist’s body, a hand with a brush, the edge of a canvas, the place where Harvey Breverman would be, if only we could see him.
Copyright 2004 by Bruce Jackson