The Neo Immaculates (Essay)

“There is a dedicated formalism in these paintings which are nevertheless ebullient in their total effect . . . .”

Marina Stern, Broadway, 1980, oil on canvas, signed and dated verso, 39 x 42 inches

Introduction

The Neo Immaculates unites nine artists who, during the 1960s through the 1980s, produced a striking body of crisp, austere paintings and prints primarily focused on the built environment. Drawing on Precisionism, Pop Art, Hard Edge Painting, Surrealism, and even Minimalism, the Neo Immaculates fashioned a unique synthesis that was deeply rooted in these precedents, while also creating an innovative new vision which carried forward the narrative of early American modernism into the second half of the 20th Century. The oldest of these artists (i.e. Edward Biberman, Allan Gould and Edmund Lewandowski) were born soon after 1900 and are often associated with the second generation Precisionists, while most of the younger artists (i.e. Alfred Maurice, Robert Herrmann, Marina Stern, Lowell Nesbitt, and John Kalamaras) were born in the 1920s and 1930s. Saul Chase is the youngest, having been born in the last year of World War II and is the only surviving member of the group.

The art of the Neo Immaculates is clean and hard-edged with clearly defined lines and smooth – almost machine-like – surfaces which often reach the level of finish fetish. Informed by photography, principal forms are simplifled and compositions severely cropped. Devoid of figures, Neo Immaculate works are nevertheless often filled with the creations of humanity. Many of the Neo Immaculates celebrated the beauty of commonplace forms – office buildings, barns, bridges, factories, storage tanks, highways, doors, windows and streetlights - all perfected by the hand of the artist through the elimination of extraneous details and any signs of wear or deterioration. Some members of the group, including Biberman, Stern and most notably Nesbitt, also turned their gaze toward the natural world applying the same Neo Immaculate principles to plants, flowers and uninhabited landscapes.

Alfred Maurice (1921 – 2019), Yellow Bumping Post, 1981, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right, 32 x 48 inches

Most of the artists in The Neo Immaculates did not know one another. They independently depicted similar subjects and developed kindred approaches through their mutual concern for the interplay of light and shadow on the otherwise neglected and unseen structures and forms of everyday life. Often employing a non-naturalistic palette applied in broad expanses of unmodulated or narrowly modulated colors, the Neo-Immaculates favored cool, stark, flattened imagery without a trace of obvious emotion or expression. Looking back fifty years at the creations of this disparate group of artists, one is struck by the beauty the Neo Immaculates gleaned from their everyday surroundings.

Origins and Influences

During the development of the Neo Immaculate style from the 1960s through the 1980s, critics and curators did not characterize them as a group or school. That they hailed from all parts of the United States likely contributed to this phenomenon.(1) Similar to the Precisionists, the artworld struggled to categorize their output and it is only with the benefit of hindsight that the common concerns and visual similarities of the Neo Immaculates have come into focus. The terms “New Realist,” “Abstract Realist,” “Imagist Realism,” “Supra Realist,” and “Synthetic Realist” were used at various times to describe the artists in this exhibition, but the term “Neo Immaculate” seems most appropriate, since these artists are heirs to “The Immaculate School,” a label coined in the 1920s as an alternative to Precisionism. The title “Neo Immaculate” has the benefit of being precisely descriptive and less confusing than “New Precisionist” or “Neo Precisionist,” the latter a term which has already been adopted by a group of younger contemporary artists applying Precisionist idioms to their Non Fungible Token (NFT) practices.

Lewandowski and Biberman were themselves second generation Precisionists who late in their careers overlapped with the younger artists in this exhibition. All of them looked back to the first generation Precisionists for inspiration. Writing about Marina Stern in connection with one of her solo exhibitions, the Forum Gallery noted, “She is directly in the line of the Precisionists – painters such as Charles Sheeler, Ralston Crawford and Charles Demuth,”(2) and a second commenter recorded, “Her pristine images dry and geometric . . . pay homage to some of her most venerated early twentieth-century precursors, in particular to the Precisionists, and thereby sustain one tradition of modernism at the same time they expand its relevance to the present.”(3) Concerning Nesbitt, another author observed, “He claims O’Keefe, Sheeler and Demuth as his artistic grandparents from the Precisionist movement earlier this century. Like them, he paints recognizable places and objects with a hard-edge brush in a hand that once painted only abstract forms.”(4) Herrmann wrote his master’s thesis on The Stylistic Development of Charles Demuth. Biberman, who was not an artist to acknowledge his influences, recalled that Demuth’s My Egypt was significant in his development as a painter.(5) Chase, an artist who was born a decade after Demuth’s death, was also connected to Precisionist aesthetics. “Mr. Chase is a high-keyed precisionist whose hard-edged views of deserted streets and industrial buildings are softened by unusually mild colors – generally pale blues, light purples, soft tans,” wrote James R. Mellow in a New York Times review. “There is a very pleasing atmospheric quality to this work.”(6)

Edmund Lewandowski (1914 – 1996), Amish Farmscape #3, 1984, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right, 30 x 40 inches

The Neo Immaculate style is not, however, a mere continuation of Precisionism from the first half of the 20th Century for three key reasons. First, there is the question of timing. By the 1960s, most of the first generation Precisionists had passed and Precisionism itself was already considered an older historical style ripe for re-examination.(7) That artists like Biberman, Lewandowski and Ralston Crawford continued their respective practices does not change the fact that intervening modes, such as Abstract Expressionism, had transformed the artistic landscape and marked a significant break with the past. Second, the hyperfocus of the Neo Immaculates on meticulous surface, complete elimination of brush strokes, strikingly imaginative palettes, lack of overt social content or commentary, severe editing of extraneous details, and increased scale of paintings and prints all represented a departure from earlier Precisionist practices. No one would confuse a Neo Immaculate painting by Maurice, Stern, Kalamaras or Chase with one by Sheeler or Demuth. They are often cut from the same cloth but constructed using very different patterns. Lastly, some of these intervening styles which interrupted the march of Precisionism beyond World War II provided fertile material for the Neo Immaculates to incorporate in their effort to create a newly updated form of modern realism.

In addition to Precisionism, the Neo Immaculates drew on Surrealism, Pop Art, Hard-Edge Painting and Minimalism. Although varied in visual outcomes, each of these movements, together with Precisionism, represented a form of Classicism which stood in stark contrast to the Romanticism of Abstract Expressionism, the dominant form of American art during the late 1940s through the early 1960s. Stern, Maurice and Nesbitt passed through Expressionist phases before arriving at their mature Neo Immaculate paintings. Exactly why this group sat so comfortably with a renewed Classicism is not clear. Perhaps it was a desire to go against the grain of artworld fashion of the 1950s, a reaction to the messy societal, cultural and political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, an exploration of nostalgia and memory or a straightforward desire to reflect the grandeur and wonder of the built and natural worlds. What is clear is that the Neo Immaculates undertook a deep and complex synthesis of American styles from across the 20th Century.

During the 1930s, the paintings of Biberman and Gould were frequently associated with Surrealism and Surrealist tendencies continued to show up in their works during the 1970s. “The consistent theme through most of these seemingly disparate stages of development, including the Pop paintings, is a quality of surrealism,” wrote a critic concerning Marina Stern’s work. “The imaginary room interiors which preceded her mature style have the timeless atmosphere of a de Chirico. Stern says the decision to move from the imaginary rooms to real architecture came upon her as a natural and obvious development.”(8) Alfred Frankenstein of the San Francisco Chronicle also placed John Kalamaras together with the Surrealists when he noted that the artist’s “painting of architecture and nature is prosaic, literal, low-keyed in color, but filled with a wonderful ominousness. Each canvas is charged with a sense of something strange which is about to happen…surrealism drops its shock tactics and explores its atmosphere of feeling with greater subtlety than ever.”(9) Critics also associated Kalamaras with Magic Realism, the American second cousin of Surrealism.(10)

The solid structures, firm lines, highly designed forms, and sleek surfaces of the Neo Immaculates also relate to Hard-Edge Painting, Pop Art, and Minimalism. Stern was described as “[a] most modern painter, her work combines a hard-edged Cubism with the uncompromising stare of surrealist daylight.”(11) Stern, Kalamaras and Nesbitt adopted Pop Art sensibilities in their Neo Immaculate works, without the overt irony. Stern herself had been a Pop Artist. She exhibited in The New American Realism at the Worcester Museum of Art in 1965 with the major figures of the Pop Art movement, including Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, and Claus Oldenberg.(12)

Saul Chase (b. 1945), Ramp with a Red Roof, 1981, serigraph on paper, signed and dated lower right, edition “166/175” inscribed lower left, titled bottom center, 26 x 20 inches (image), 35 x 27 inches (sheet)

Although the works of several of the Neo Immaculates bear a passing similarity to the Photorealists of the 1970s, there are significant differences and many of the Neo Immaculates dismissed the comparison. “I use a camera as a time-saving sketching tool to capture the many subjects I feel may possibly translate into paintings,” remarked Maurice, “However, I am obviously not a photorealist.”(13) Commenting on Stern’s work, a critic noted, “Because of the photographic accuracy of form and detail in all of her work, it is tempting to compare it with that of the Photo-Realists. There is a difference. Whereas their work is often filled with detail rendered exactly from photographs, sometimes even projected photographically onto the canvas, her’s [sic] is selective and restrained. Values, forms and detail are simplified, highlighted, and accentuated for a strong overall design. Unlike the Photo-Realists’ works, her paintings are never anecdotal.”(14) By eliminating the dirt, grime and other messy details of the metropolis and the farmyard and the fussy details of subjects that might interfere with their stripped-down vision of the American landscape, the Neo Immaculates deviated from the Photo Realists. The Neo Immaculates did not seek memetic verisimilitude. Rather, they created a beautifully designed alternate reality by editing and essentializing the building blocks of the observed world.

The Built Environment

Constructed forms were the muse of the Neo Immaculates. For many, their paintings and prints were celebrations of the creations of humanity. A well designed building, freeway or bridge was the apogee of human achievement for Biberman, turning his architectural paintings into religious icons of Southern California modern life. Stern’s depictions of New York’s built environment also took on the quasi-religious significance. As one writer noted, “every object that does appear in them has come off someone’s drafting board and passed through the hands of a multitude of thinking, building, practical men . . . Marina’s Stern’s tanks, towers, ventilators, bridge-spans, street-signs, cornices and windows become lucid commentaries on that modern miracle: Metropolis.”(15)

Marina Stern (1928 – 2017), Con Ed, 1978, oil on canvas, signed and dated verso, 40 x 50 inches

For Maurice, his “cityscapes were all attempts to tell people, ‘Hey look! This is what’s around you without all the chipped paint and cracked bricks. These are the forms that are around you. Look beyond all the details and see what things are like.’”(16) Both Biberman and Maurice used the “monumentality of anonymous structures and their juxtapositions”(17) as a means to capture and preserve the vernacular architecture of the metropolis that would normally be ignored. Through his roughly eighty urban paintings and and more than a dozen prints between 1968 and 1980, Chase also portrayed the “semi industrial landscape, that pre-gentrification, went mostly unnoticed and unloved.”18 Herrmann’s entire oeuvre focused singularly on buildings, roadways, water towers, factories, ventilator shafts and other features of modern engineering that he encountered from New York to Cincinnati and St. Louis to Seattle. Many of these generic structures served as the basis for the formal construction of alternative realities. In Herrmann’s master’s thesis, his description of Demuth’s art applied equally to Herrmann’s own painting, “He rearranged the casual congestion of shapes and the chance accumulation of textures of urban backyards into colorful patterns much as the Cubists combined the hap-hazard [sic] paraphernalia of their studios into decorative still lifes. Both used the architectonic objects in their immediate environment as the basis of experiments in form and technique.”(19)

In addition to the formal qualities afforded by the built environment, the Neo Immaculates viewed the structures of the American landscape as a point of departure for exploring concerns for and relationships to the past. “Through the places and paths of the social environment, both urban and rural, and in the cathedrals of twentieth century industry, Stern’s contemporary messages are constituted through the icons of cultural memories, the nostalgia for progress, and the history of habitation and inhabitation of the earth,” is how one commentator described Stern’s Neo Immaculate paintings.(20) Writing about Kalamaras’ spare scenes of isolated architectural elements, another critic reflected on the emotions elicited by viewing the refined surfaces of his compositions, “The poignancy, the sadness, the nostalgia become bearable through being universal. We have all seen such windows, gazed at such scenes, approached such doors. John Kalamaras makes us really feel the sense of loss but does not leave us there.”(21) Chase recalls his Neo Immaculate scenes welled up from nostalgia and memories of growing up in the Bronx, “In these reverential renderings, nondescript architectural odds and ends – prosaic remnants of an earlier time – are reconstructed and cleansed of all human references and narrative. Each painting stands as a staged rendition of a singular experience that been revisited through time and perfected.”(22)

Edward Biberman (1904 – 1986), Warner Corner, c. 1980s, oil on masonite, signed upper right, 22 ½ x 35 ½ inches

The elimination of the human form is a common characteristic of the Neo Immaculates. Maurice explained, “people and incident are suppressed in order to capture the greater drama” represented by the formal qualities of the depopulated city."(23) Like Maurice, Biberman erased humanity from his architectural paintings of the 1960s and 1970s. He honored the fruits of their labors, but refused to feature the architects, engineers, iron workers, plasters and carpenters who created the beloved structures, as well as the shoppers, worshipers, office workers and apartment dwellers who inhabited those spaces. Herrmann never depicted the human form. Stern rarely did so. As the Forum Gallery noted, “There are no people or animals to ‘pollute’ her dramas, no flaws in her spotless structures.”(24) In connection with her 2007 solo retrospective, Perception and the Cultural Environment The Paintings of Marina Stern, Professor Stephen Foster observed, “Stern's works evoke a humanity realized in its absence; its presence is implied in its achievements but never revealed.”(25)

Light and Shadow

Although commentators often focused on Stern’s idealization of the constructed environment and its accompanying grandeur, the artist herself was ambivalent about her choice of subject matter. Like many of the Neo Immaculates, Stern used the structures of humanity as a foil for exploring her real interest – light. “Subject matter as such is of no importance to me,” she recalled, “Whether I am painting a barn, an industrial structure or a cabbage, my concern is light.”(26) Similarly, Biberman told an interviewer, “Of course light makes these paintings. It’s the light that reveals things.”(27) He recalled the temporality of the viewing experience of Southern California’s seemingly endless low slung vernacular buildings. “I came by there one day and the whole thing was revealed by the way that shadow was cast,” Biberman recalled, “In other lights, it’s nothing – with that light, it was fantastic.”(28) For his part, Maurice acknowledged the important role that light and shadow played in the development of his Chicago cityscapes. Maurice noted he was “Primarily interested in the three-dimensionality of building forms, usually overlaid by the two-dimensionality of light and shade. I strive for a maximum expression of space and light in my work.”(29)

The magical appeal of light portrayed on canvas is enhanced by its counterpart, shadow. In connection with her first solo exhibition of Neo Immaculate paintings, Lee Ault & Co. Gallery recorded, “Marina Stern loves light. But because she loves light, she is also obligated to love shadows.”(30) The author continued, “Marina Stern’s paintings reveal the majesty of light by meticulously recording the traces of its absence. Lovingly, she observes the shadows as they twist, turn, cross, caress, soften, harden, lengthen and shorten across the surfaces of the forms she chooses for her impeccable compositions.”(31)

Marina Stern (2028 – 2017) Photograph of Buildings used as source material for Route 41, Vertical, c. 1979. (catalog 29)

Many of the Neo Immaculates used photography as a tool for the development of form and structure in addition to the tonal qualities of light and shadow. This approach was also common among the Precisionists, particularly, Sheeler and Crawford. Maurice, Chase, Herrmann and Stern employed black and white and color photography to work out their compositions. Maurice recalled his artistic process, “The camera is used as a drawing tool . . . Perspective is adjusted, details are omitted or rearranged and colors are often heightened or changed to stress relationships to form.”(32) Chase also worked loosely from photographs to “dissect[] and reconstruct[] the buildings, store fronts, streets, bridges, and skies captured by his camera.”(33) The Stern family still retains hundreds of snapshots taken by the artist during the 1970s and 1980s of the structures that caught her eye across New York and Connecticut. From these photographs, Stern then developed working drawings. Her process was described as follows: “Stern collects ideas for paintings, taking photographs, and making precisely rendered drawings. . . She uses photographs in her work, but only as aids, cropping and adjusting them for design.”(34)

Conclusion

The nine artists represented in The Neo Immaculates were not alone in their efforts to create an innovative designed reality informed by a synthesis of Precisionism and the other classifying calls to order of 20th century America. These nine represent a small cross section of like-minded Neo Immaculate painters and printmakers who merit re-examination with the benefit of hindsight informed by the past five decades. From 1960 through the 1980s, many others emerged to join the artists in this exhibition in the project to reflect the built “environment through a formalistic sieve” by employing an “unmodulated and crisply-edged areas of color . . . that intensifies the experience of light, of seeing itself.”(35) The depopulated industrial and architectural scenes of John Patrick Civitello, Keith McDaniel, Barry Brothers and Stephen De Santo are just a few of the examples of Neo Immaculate works that furthered this effort, which unfortunately, has been long over shadowed by the more dominant “isms” of the period. Moreover, the examples of works included in The Neo Immaculates barely scratch the surface of the practices of these nine artists during this thirty-year period. Hopefully, The Neo Immaculates will provide a modest start in the journey of rediscovering these and other artists working in this late 20th century modernist vein.

(1) Stern, Chase and Nesbitt worked mainly in New York and the Northeast, while Maurice was in Chicago, Lewandowski worked in his native Wisconsin, as well as Florida and South Carolina, Herrmann spent time in Cincinnati, New York, and the Pacific Northwest, and Biberman and Kalamaras settled in California.

(2) An Exhibition of Recent Paintings by Marina Stern, Forum Gallery, New York, NY, October 6 to 26, 1979, brochure (Forum 1979 Brochure)

(3) Foster, Stephen, Professor Emeritus of Art History, University of Iowa, Perception and Cultural Environment The Paintings of Marina Stern, Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Alatoona, PA, January 19 to April 22, 2007, brochure

(4) Dickman, Sharon, Lowell Nesbitt’s Art: Mysterious Realism, The Evening Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 1, 1975

(5) Audio Interview of Edward Biberman, conducted by Emily Corey under the auspices of the Oral History Program, University of California Los Angeles, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, November 23, 1975 to March 4, 1976 (8.5 hours)

(6) Mellow, James R., Saul Chase, The New York Times, March 3, 1973

(7) The first major historical re-examination of Precisionism occurred in 1960 with The Precisionist View in American Art organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, which focused on works from the 1920s and 1930s.

(8) Agar, Eunice, Marina Stern, American Artist, vol. 47, issue 494, September, 1983, p. 59

(9) Obituary of John Kalamaras, https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/timesheraldonline/name/john-kalamarasobituary?id=7435670

(10) Allman, Paul, Diebenkorn in Local Show, The Independent (Richmond, CA), January 11, 1969

(11) Forum 1979 Brochure

(12) The New American Realism, Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, MA, February 18 – April 4, 1965, catalog

(13) Alfred P. Maurice Artist in the City Paintings 1979 – 1997, The Archer Gallery of Clark College, Vancouver, WA, April 8 to 30, 1997, artist’s Comments in brochure (Archer Gallery Brochure)

(14) Agar, p. 60

(15) Marina Stern, Lee Ault & Company, New York, NY, May 9 to June 9, 1973, brochure (Lee Ault & Company Brochure)

(16) Albright, Mary Ann, Alfred’s Lively Arts, The Columbian (Vancouver, WA), February 4, 2008

(17) Chicago An Exhibition of Paintings Photographs and Sounds By Alfred P. Maurice, A. Montgomery Ward Gallery, University of Illinois at Chicago, March 29 to April 9, 1982, A Statement by the Artist in brochure (Montgomery Ward Brochure)

(18) https://saulchase.com/projects

(19) Robert Herrmann, Cincinnati Art Galleries, Cincinnati, OH, March 4 to 28, 2000, brochure

(20) Foster

(21) Allman

(22) https://saulchase.com/singular-vision-paintings

(23) Montgomery Ward Brochure

(24) Forum 1979 Brochure

(25) Foster

(26) Marina Stern American Precisionist Painter, Santa Fe East Galleries, Santa Fe, New Mexico, November 2 to 20, 1984, brochure

(27) Harris, Eleanor, An Artist Talks About His Style, The Santa Monica Outlook, March 18, 1978

(28) Ibid.

(29) Archer Gallery Brochure

(30) Lee Ault & Company Brochure

(31) Ibid.

(32) Montgomery Ward Brochure

(33) Mecklenburg, Virginia M., Modern American Realism, Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC (1987), p. 41

(34) Agar, p. 59

(35) Archer Gallery Brochure