ART : In the Foreground : Ross Bleckner presides over the New York art scene both as a high-profile arbiter of taste and as a painter of pure Abstraction

When New York artist Ross Bleckner arrived in Los Angeles three weeks ago to oversee the installation of his first exhibition here in five years, he went straight from the airport not to the Fred Hoffman Gallery, but to the set of “Cheers.” A longtime pal of the show’s producer James Burrows (who’s also a contemporary collector of some note), Bleckner had been invited to appear as an extra and he jumped at the chance; he can be seen loitering at the bar in an episode airing sometime in January.

Those who know Bleckner only on the basis of his art may be surprised by this, as his work is of the utmost seriousness--rigorously thought out, steeped in history, somber in tone. Those who know anything about Bleckner’s life, however, won’t be at all surprised to see him hanging out on a prime-time sitcom.

Dubbed “the Godfather of SoHo” in a recent laudatory Vanity Fair profile by Anthony Haden-Guest (who is a society writer rather than an art critic), Bleckner is a high profile bon vivant with a forceful personality and an infallible instinct for networking. Bleckner’s career didn’t really get rolling until eight years ago, but he’s been an arbiter of taste at the center of the New York art world for twice as long as that.

With a thick Rolodex of friends including everyone from mega-collector and dealer Thomas Ammann to Bianca Jagger, Bleckner seems to know everyone. It was Bleckner who introduced a young novice art dealer named Mary Boone to Julian Schnabel and David Salle in 1977 (both of whom, along with Bleckner, debuted as part of Boone’s original stable of artists when her gallery opened in 1978). In 1974 he bought and moved into the building on White Street in Lower Manhattan that housed legendary avant-garde nightspot the Mudd Club from 1977 through 1983, so he monitored that world as well. (Bleckner continues to live in the building--his art production has now spread to take over all five floors.) An ardent supporter of young artists--known for dispensing favors, buying works and making introductions--Bleckner seems to pump as much energy and money into the scene as he does into his own work.

“You can’t have the kind of career Ross has without working the social angle--that’s one of the art world’s dirty little secrets and it’s something peculiar to that arena,” says David Hershkovitz, who, as editor and publisher of the trendy Manhattan periodical Paper Magazine, has been observing the New York scene for years. “It’s not like selling a million records or books--an artist sells his work piece by piece, one on one, and Ross is very good at that.”

That Bleckner knows how to work the room doesn’t negate the significance of his creative contribution to art; he played a central role in reopening a door for painting that was firmly shut when he arrived in New York in 1973 after graduating from CalArts, and had a double lock on it by the time his work began making waves in the early ‘80s. Credited with helping pave the way for a disparate group of younger artists that includes Peter Halley, Philip Taaffe, Peter Schuyff, Moira Dryer, Michael Young, Joan Nelson and the Starn Twins, Bleckner arrived at a time when media-based work ruled the roost, and the posture of choice was an irony so unremitting that it tipped into nihilism. If one insisted on painting, the only acceptable style was swaggeringly macho Neo-Expressionism; Bleckner’s work was at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum.

Espousing a quiet style of pure Abstraction in the tradition of Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, incongruously tarted up with Symbolist flourishes evocative of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, Bleckner’s work was rooted in the old-fashioned belief--quite out of vogue at the time--that painting had real meaning; that it was, in fact, a holy act. There wasn’t the slightest trace of irony in Bleckner’s work. Rather, he worked openly and unequivocally with the operatic end of the emotional spectrum where grief and mortality reside. Black is the dominant color in his palette, and his most overtly woeful canvases read as elegiac emblems of despair. Funereal and romantic in the extreme (his vocabulary of recurring imagery includes those venerable romantic motifs--trophies, ribbons and wreaths), his fin de siecle aesthetic is well suited to the final decade of the 20th Century. Critic Brooks Adams has aptly described Bleckner’s work as “post-nuclear Impressionism.”

When Bleckner began making paintings about the AIDS epidemic in 1985, the sense of fragility and sadness that had always wafted about his work came to be widely read as a metaphor for the disease. However, his paintings are far too complex and open-ended to be summarized as being “about” any one thing. Village Voice critic Gary Indiana has said of Bleckner’s work that it “attempts to reconstitute the ‘aura’ that supposedly faded from art when it was exposed to the glare of mechanical reproduction”; and, indeed, Bleckner’s work does hark back to a pre-Pop era when history rather than media was our shared frame of reference, handmade objects were accorded great value and artists were more willing to risk public displays of tenderness. Shimmering with an eerie, melancholy light, his paintings seem to emit an almost audible sigh of loss.

“In a sense, all my work is an exploration of a light that comes from inside,” Bleckner says. “Be it classical or modern, the most crucial part of painting to me is a particular quality of light that telegraphs a kind of libidinal psychological charge and a tension that’s neither sentimental nor cliched--it’s about a search and an opening up. All the most important work has it--you see it when you look at a Goya or a Velazquez. First there’s a light that’s rendered that makes planes and shadows and space, but there’s also a second and much deeper light--in religious painting it’s called the light of God. We don’t use phrases like that now because they seem inaccurate to the modern era. That phrase may be obsolete, but the feeling this light engenders is as compelling as it’s ever been. It’s something the human soul will always need.”

Talking with Bleckner in his room at a West Hollywood hotel, one finds him to be a good deal more lighthearted than one might expect considering the work he creates. He has an open, expansive personality, laughs easily and is the picture of robust health. Bleckner’s first dealer, Betty Cunningham, once described him as “very, very morose,” and he concedes her assessment was accurate at the time she made it. However, at 42, Bleckner has made peace with many of the demons that drove him during his 20s and 30s. He attributes his change in temperament to three factors: the maturing that’s a natural part of aging, the AIDS epidemic and success.

“I used to have a melodramatic streak that was quite genuine, but I’m becoming less that way as I get older,” he reflects. “One’s melancholy lessens with age because it becomes more objectified--I understand things now less as a personal predicament and more as a state in the world. And the AIDS epidemic changed my sense of what’s important in life and gave me an increased appreciation of what a privilege it is simply to exist. And finally, achieving some success changed my frame of mind. Though lots of artists deny it, success is something we all want, and because of my background it was extremely important to me. And getting it helped.”

Bleckner’s comment about his background might suggest that he grew up selling pencils on a street corner, but in fact he comes from a wealthy family. Born in New York City in 1949, the middle child in a family of three children, Bleckner was raised on Long Island in Hewlett Harbor, a prosperous community that Bleckner describes as “not unlike Beverly Hills in that it was insulated and shockingly devoid of culture.” Bleckner’s father owned an electronics company and his mother put aside her fantasies of a theatrical career to raise her children.

“For me, art wasn’t a visual or aesthetic thing--it was an emotional necessity,” recalls Bleckner, who briefly toyed with the idea of a career in journalism before committing himself to art. “I was an intensely miserable teen-ager and art provided a soothing place I could escape into. I remember having this crushing fear of being average and I believed then--and still do, to a degree--that if you did one thing passionately and completely it would cover up all the inadequacies you perceive in yourself.

“I was interested in art throughout my childhood but my first real inkling that art was a serious proposition didn’t come until I was in college,” he adds. “I enrolled at NYU as a philosophy major (he graduated with a degree in 1972), but I was very innocent throughout my college years in that I had no idea art was something living people actually practiced--I thought you had to be dead to be a great artist. I did take art classes though, and a pivotal moment for me was when a teacher of mine, Chuck Close, told me that just a few blocks away there were all these galleries I should check out. I did and it was a total shock.” In 1973 Bleckner enrolled at CalArts, where he was to spend an important year. It was there he forged friendships that continue to this day with fellow students Eric Fischl, David Salle and Matt Mullican, while his involvement with painting deepened.

At the end of 1973 Bleckner returned to New York, where he was to paint for 18 months in preparation for his debut solo show at the Cunningham Ward Gallery in 1975. Bleckner didn’t fret as much as he might have when not a piece in the show sold, because his parents had helped him buy the building on White Street in 1974. (He hired a then-unknown painter named Julian Schnabel to help him remodel his loft for a salary of $3 an hour, but quickly realized “Julian wasn’t the employable type.”) Around this same time Bleckner made the acquaintance of Mary Boone, who was soon to quit her job as an assistant at the now-defunct Bykert Gallery in order to deal privately. With all the players moving into place, New York’s ‘80s art boom was getting ready to explode.

Of that heady decade, Bleckner says: “Young artists began to make what was considered a lot of money by art world standards, but a lot of money for an artist is what a third-tier bureaucrat in an advertising agency makes. I don’t think it was a decadent era--I think artists did well and many critics were aghast that artists should get a fraction of what an actor in a mediocre film gets paid. That’s over now--the speculators have gone and things have calmed down. I hope the interest in art continues, but I do think conditions are better now for people who are genuinely supportive--and there are lots of them.”

Though the prices for Bleckner’s works are now in the six-figure range and continue to climb (works at the Fred Hoffman show are priced from $20,000 for small pieces to $135,000 for large canvases), his career didn’t kick into gear until well into the ‘80s. Though Bleckner was included in the 1975 Whitney Biennial (he’s been featured in two more since then) and was recognized by his peers as a major talent from the time he arrived in New York, his first show at Mary Boone raised barely a ripple of interest and his 1981 show there did little better, with only two works being sold. However, it was hailed by critics as an immensely important body of work. It was there Bleckner introduced a style of painting rooted in refigured motifs from Op-art, a short-lived ‘60s style based on blindingly intense optical effects.

These paintings were regarded as a beacon of change by many young artists and they continue to be among Bleckner’s most-coveted works (advertising magnate Charles Saatchi owns several of them). Part of their value is in their rarity; two years after the Op-art show, Bleckner struck out in an entirely new direction with a series of brooding, nocturnal “landscapes.” That show sold out, as did his Boone show of 1984, and Bleckner was off and running.

In 1985 Bleckner began the body of paintings designed to document and commemorate the AIDS epidemic, a series he vows to continue until the epidemic ends. Sometimes the references to AIDS are specific; a work titled “16,301+ as of January 1987,” for instance, refers to an AIDS body count, while canvases featuring rough, modeled surfaces are intended to evoke the welted skin that’s a symptom of Kaposi’s sarcoma. However, it’s in Bleckner’s more metaphoric paintings revolving around images of wreaths and trophies that his memento mori for AIDS achieves its full, haunting power.

“We learn how to live our lives and how to adapt, but there’s so much grief,” he says softly. “I feel fear, and I think AIDS has taken a huge toll on people psychologically. One of the things I’ve learned from it is that it is possible to construct a life in the midst of chaos and there is hope in that knowledge. It’s curious how life burns the brightest when one is acutely aware that it ends.

“My ambitions have changed a lot,” he adds. “I don’t care if I’m not the most famous artist in the world--and that used to be the only thing that was important to me. I want to be an artist who can deal with the tragedy many of us are experiencing, but at the same time, I’m no longer willing to jeopardize my mental health to do it. It’s a delicate line to walk and takes a lot of refinement, and there were long periods in the past when I was swamped by my subject matter. Maybe that’s why I was called morose.”

Bleckner recently returned to his fully renovated Manhattan loft, having spent 18 months traveling in Europe. He’s a morning worker--”that’s when my concentration is best”--who paints from around 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. He requires silence and solitude to get a painting rolling, but “once it gets going I can work surrounded by chaos,” he says. He completes between 10 and 20 paintings a year. He has two assistants who prepare his canvases and tend to the administration of his career, but he lives alone with his 18-year-old dog, Renny.

“I think all art is the search for love and in a way all my paintings are constructed in the form of a love letter. I do feel loved at this point,” he says, laughing, “but I guess I’m looking for something special.”

On the subject of social savvy in regards to artists’ careers, Bleckner says: “At a certain point I realized I wanted to be an important artist, and if you want to be an important artist you don’t move to Des Moines. You know what you have to do, you can’t fear it, and you have to deliberately contextualize yourself and your work. You don’t put on a beret and commune with God and suddenly have a career--it takes a certain amount of practical decision making.

“At the same time,” he adds, “I don’t think social skills are that important for artists because I know successful artists who are completely inept socially. I also know artists who like to party, but either way, the work is the thing--if you don’t have the work, social skills aren’t going to redress that. Still, it’s frowned upon for artists to be socially adept creatures. We’re still supposed to be starving in garrets, and I think critics, and to an extent the public, have a hard time accepting us as otherwise.”