Arts and Letters

Some of us were just discussing, remembering the exhibitions at Alan Gallery of Nathan Oliveira, when it used to be in the mid-fifties, upstairs, on Madison Avenue. And that’s where we would go and enjoy his work.

Nathan Oliveira was born in Oakland, California in 1928, he was a year younger than me, the only child of Portuguese immigrants who separated when he was one. He learned at age ten that his father had drowned in a boating accident. Susan Landauer, Chief Curator at the San Jose Museum of Art writes that themes of “death, struggle, and isolation recurred throughout his career.” In 1959, as a young painter of 31, Oliveira was selected for the “New Images of Man,” an exhibition curated by Peter Selz at MoMA. The exhibition launched Oliveira’s career, but the immediate success overwhelmed him and led to what Oliveira referred to as his “fallow” period, during which he turned away from painting and toward printmaking.

Earlier in the 1950s, while in a painting class with Otis Oldfield, Oliveira said the students were asked to put newspaper on the surface of their painting and pull it off a couple of times, which took all the excess paint and oil off the surface of the canvas so that the next day it would be a better surface to work on. Oliveira would look at these pieces of newsprint with offset color on them and say, “Hey....” Years later, during Oliveira’s dry spell, which Selz says caused a painting block, Oliveira saw de Kooning use a similar technique, and from there he began to experiment with monotype.

Giovanna Bertazzoni, head of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s in London, has said that the monotype is itself a kind of “‘in between’ medium: a hybrid [...] between painting and printmaking,” and Oliveira was interested in “the idea of ‘in between,’ the definition of a magic corridor of space and time, a no-man’s land, inhabited by the creative spirit of the artist.” Landauer wrote that “‘Between’ [was] an important word notion for Oliveira…[he always understood] that art, like poetry, lives in the ellipses—the space between the words, the space that induces the viewer to fill in the blanks… [M]ystery… is what his art is all about.” Robert Flynn Johnson, Curator Emeritus of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, has said that as Oliveira’s approach to monotypes evolved, they were “infused with a brooding ambiguity that characterized Oliveira’s refusal to be representational or abstract. He desired his art to occupy a place between consciousness and vision.” Selz said that Oliveira described his artwork with the Portuguese word, saudade, a feeling of yearning and nostalgia.

When Oliveira came to Stanford to teach painting in 1965, where he remained until retirement in 1995, he started a program in lithography. Lorenz Eitner, chair of the Art Department at Stanford from 1963–1989, wrote that for Oliveira, lithography was an extension of painting because like painting, it “subverted his intentions and opened opportunities to further exploration.” Johnson said that moving to monotype in the 1970s was for him “a way to bridge the gap between his interest in printmaking and the need to find a medium that would offer greater potential for his natural spontaneity.” One can understand Oliveira’s attraction to monotype, which Johnson describes as “‘artist’s medium’ with neither the seductive potential scale of painting, nor the commercial prospects of an edition that printmaking affords,” but rather “a labor-intensive activity of intimate scale….” Oliveira believed “You have to destroy something to get to another place.” In a 1995 interview he said, “It’s a big gamble, offering up a sacrifice. [...] If the idea lacks credibility, you have to push it to the next level. Many times you miss it, but that’s what it’s all about.” He said he created from “destruction and sacrifice” rather than from “exuberance and enthusiasm.”

His love of flight, which Selz says began in his childhood when he would make drawings of birds, permeated Oliveira’s approach. Friends would bring him stuffed barn owls, roadrunners, swallows, and swifts, and he also drew inspiration from watching birds while on long walks with his wife, Mona. Selz said that Oliveira “envied these creatures’ ability to soar.” Oliveira himself felt that “Flight was a way of reaching beyond our experiences metaphorically. Reaching,” he said, “is an important issue in being a creative artist...exploring the flight of the mind and of the senses.”

Oliveira was inducted into the Academy in 1994, shortly after he told an interviewer, “Success in what I do is measured by surviving into one’s mature years and continuing to find enough genuine reasons to work.” After Mona’s death of cancer in 2006, Oliveira again found himself unable to paint. But he eventually returned to his studio working with clay to create a series of small masks. Curator Signe Mayfield of Palo Alto Arts Center wrote that the masks “speak of deeply felt grief and of that forbidden subject in our culture, death.” Oliveira died November 13th, 2010, four years ago tomorrow.