Modes of Perception
Excerpts from Modes of Perception: Paintings by Vincent Campanella, curated and with an essay by Robert Morris, April 5 - May 13, 1995 (Hunter College).
Vincent Campanella, my first painting teacher at the Kansas City Art Institute, was born in New York City in 1915. Recently I visited him in Kansas City, and once again looked at pictures I had not seen for almost 45 years.
The paintings are not large. Most are around three feet on the longest side. Most of the pictures are nominally landscapes. The earlier works made in the 1930s have a more conventionally representational format and depict urban scenes - factories and apartments and somber city streets (Factory, Silver Stacks). The works from the late 1940s and 1950s - after Campanella first visited Wyoming in the late 1930s under the aegis of the WPA art program - are primarily landscapes. Generalized blocky shapes and a muted palette predominate. Stylistically the paintings have some vague affinity with the work of artists such as John Marin who sought a dynamic sense of forces in landscapes informed by the Cubist grid. But the forces implied in Campanella's landscapes of the late 40's seem somber, tactile, incremental, almost geological. ...
In the late 1940s Campanella showed with Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper in the Frank Rehn Gallery in New York. But since these two painters were the ones who sold in the gallery, Campanella felt he was shunted aside. When Rehn died, Campanella did not make an effort to find another gallery. By then he was in the Midwest teaching.
"Everything was so easy in the beginning. I won all the prizes," he said. Campanella was not prepared for what happened after the Second World War when the new American abstraction burst onto the scene. " 'Have you changed?' is what everybody asked," he said.
Besides his involvement in painting, Campanella possessed a sophisticated mechanical sense. He developed innovative machining procedures during the Second World War. After the War he declined executive positions in this field in order to pursue art. "What I liked about mechanical problems was that there was always a solution," he said. And added, "What I liked about art was that there never was a solution." ...
At 80 Campanella is a highly articulate man of sharp intelligence who has lived for half a century not only out of the limelight but more or less forgotten as an artist. He has made no paintings to speak of since the late 1950s. The picture, White, dated 1992, is an exception. It is an almost completely white picture - a landscape of ambiguous shapes that recalls the style of the late '40s pictures. Perhaps it is a snow storm. Or perhaps it is a kind of ghost picture that represents all the absent pictures he did not paint for forty years. Unidentifiable objects hover in the albino space. It is a barren but dense landscape; a haunted, reverberating space that suggests a metaphor for both mourning and bearing witness. Perhaps artists need a minimum of love and attention to go on after they have passed the fiery youthful years where the fullness of the self bulls forward with little need of support. ...
Recently the BBC interviewed Campanella about Thomas Hart Benton [Ken Burns' America - Thomas Hart Benton], whom Campanella knew well in Benton's later years. ... He said the BBC had asked him how the WPA art project in the '30s had helped artists. "They were not helping artists," Campanella said. "They were helping the unemployed, and artists are always unemployed." ...