Sparkling of Colors in the Painting of Domingo Izquierdo
Biographic profile of a Puerto Rican in the New York School
By Eduardo Marceles
Domingo Izquierdo was the only Puerto Rican artist to belong to the famous New York School of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and 1960s. It should be mentioned that the name of the art movement was coined only in 1965, when the Los Angeles County Museum organized an exhibition entitled “New York School: The First Generation, Paintings of the 1940s and 1950s”, which featured a lavish list of the artists who had gathered in New York at that time. Among the most well-known were Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
Izquierdo’s paintings were not included in the Los Angeles exhibition as he was one of the youngest proponents of the movement and because he carried out his painting activities in the margin of the main group that then dominated the art scene. Taken together, not only did these artists revolutionize painting with their conceptual and technical offering but also, through their creative energy, New York came to replace Paris as the capital of the art world after the Second World War.
Of course, the fact that, in one city, they practiced strands of expressionism as different as their own personalities and their various points of origin in no way meant that they belonged to a club or single circle of friends. Rather, for historical reasons, at a time when circumstances were favorable, they shared common esthetic and ideological ideals with respect to the nature of their investigation into the artistic development, giving birth to the New York School in the process.
Izquierdo was born in 1931, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to a father from Aragon, Spain and a Puerto Rican mother whose family originated in the Canary Islands. When Izquierdo was still a child, his family moved to the Bronx, New York, where he spent his school-age years. His first contact with graphic arts came at the advertising agency where he worked from 1948 to 1950. In 1950, he was recruited by the United States Army and sent to Korea, where he rendered distinguished service.
Upon his return to New York, he decided to devote himself completely to pursuing an artistic career, a vocation he had felt a calling for since he was a child. One of the first steps he took in that direction was to move to Soho. At that time, the area was not even known by the name of Soho. It was an industrial center in decline. The factories and warehouses closing down as a result of the transformation of the urban landscape were being snapped up by artists in search of cheap space to live and work. Izquierdo was one of the first artists to set up a studio in the area, which he had to turn into a livable space.
To make ends meet, he worked in a law firm library handling claims and debts arising from the Second World War. He further studied his visual techniques with a classically-schooled artist of Cuban origin, Julio Garrida Lorenzi, whose sculpture follows in the tradition of Rodin, and took courses in drawing and painting at Columbia University. His first works were exhibited at the Fulton Street Gallery, an avant-garde gallery opened by Stanley Crason, a former professional dancer whose heart condition obliged him to change profession. In this early period, Izquierdo dedicated himself to painting the landscape and rural inhabitants of Korea, from memory or with the help of photographs.
Matsumi Kanemitsu was another artist whose work was shown at the Fulton Street Gallery, and the two soon developed a close friendship. It was in Kanemitsu’s workshop that Izquierdo completed his artistic apprenticeship. The Japonese artist showed him the possibilities of abstractionism and oriental art, Zen philosophy in particular, which served as a foundation for abstraction, as can be observed in the works of Franz Kline, for example.
It was Kanemitsu, his oriental mentor, who first introduced him to the group of artists who regularly gathered at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. It was the meeting place of the beatnik poets Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouak, Gregory Corso and the Englishman Dylan Thomas, whose poetry possessed rich metaphors and intense emotions. The Cedar Tavern was also a favorite of the painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, whose defense of Abstract Expressionism often led to heated barroom brawls.
Although he was a young man just starting out in the art world, Kanemitsu’s friendship gave Izquierdo access and acceptance in the gatherings of the artists. One night when leaving the bar, Franz Kline had left on the table a napkin he had made sketches on. Kanemitsu encouraged Izquierdo to catch up to Kline and give him the napkin, but the young artist would not. In his own words, he had always been a solitary man, belonging to the generation of so-called “Angry Young Men” of the 1950s. However, it is undeniable that his contact with those painters, their discussions, the exhibitions he visited and the atmosphere in general left a permanent mark on his painting.
Izquierdo has never been an intellectual painter. He has always preferred to maintain an emotional and sensorial balance in which intuition, more than logical reasoning, is central. In 1956, he took advantage of the benefits of a job at Pan American Airlines and traveled to Europe for the first time. The artistic world of Paris enthralled the young artist, who decided to quit his job and stay in the City of Light. He later moved to Rome, a city whose charm persuaded him to move there and soak up its bohemian atmosphere. He lived from his painting, and, in 1968, his work bore fruit in the form of a grant from the John Hay Whitney Foundation. He went to New York to accept the prize so that he could return to live in Rome more comfortably. Back in Rome, he exhibited his work in a gallery in Trastévere and immersed himself in the city’s artistic scene. Those two years were one of the most intense periods of his life.
While working as an office secretary, through one of his friends in Rome he met a famous Canadian photographer, who did a photographic study of him. One day, his friends showed up with a copy of Queen Magazine, published in London, in which Izquierdo’s photograph appeared alongside the most striking figures of the time, the actors Paul Newman, Warren Beatty, the Cuban Tomas Milian, among others.
Despite his personal success in Rome, Izquierdo decided to return to New York, where he renewed his friendships there, while preserving the creative solitude that has always characterized his personality. Among his friends were the poet and playwright Frank O’Hara, at the time working at the Museum of Modern Art. The museum was the focal point of a circle of writers also known as the New York School, including Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, whose poetry was inspired by the paintings of Pollock, Kline and de Kooning. Also part of that circle was Larry Rivers, the Pop Art sculptor and artist, and the painter Joan Mitchell, one of the most important members of the second generation of abstract expressionism, to which Izquierdo also belonged. She was an extraordinary colorist painter who died an alcoholic in Paris in 1992, surrounded by her one hundred cats.
Back in New York, Izquierdo moved into an East Village apartment on Second Avenue and 10th Street. He returned to the discussions at the Cedar Tavern, where he met Osorio, a famous, decadent millionaire patron of the arts who collected the works of the painters of Abstract Expressionism in New York. Osorio was also a friend of Michel Dexter of the Warren & Dexter Gallery. Domingo Izquierdo remembers that he was drinking with friends in a bar in the Hamptons on Long Island far into the night when Pollock left them, inebriated, driving his Jaguar and with an elegant model on his arm. The most famous painter of the New York School loved alcohol, speed and beautiful women. That night, he lost control of his car and smashed into a tree, ending his life. Pollock’s widow was Lee Krasner, his companion in his artistic adventures and one of the painters who learned the most from his art.
Above the Fulton Street Gallery lived a window display artist who, while making a decent living from his work, aspired to making his reputation as a visual artist. One day he created the famous work spelling out “LOVE” in brightly colored capital letters, which became the symbol of a generation. His work also gave common words such as “EAT” and “DIE” special relevance by placing them in an innovative perspective. Izquierdo, who during Crason’s absence was left in charge of the gallery, sometimes found himself cashing checks for the man who later became famous under the name of Robert Indiana.
When he returned from Europe, one of his first jobs was in the workshop of sculptor Bill Bowie, where he learned the metal and soldering work used for commercial sculptures. But the vicissitudes of his fate soon led him to a severe depression – but with a fortunate diagnosis, however. The psychiatrist recommended that he rest, return to his roots and seek nourishment from the sea and landscape of Puerto Rico. He accepted the challenge and returned to his native land. For 18 months he took refuge in Arecibo, making handcraft-type sculptures such as flowers in bronze and wall-hangings, which sold for between $6 and $300 to tourists at La Casa del Arte gallery of Ketty Rodríguez on Fortaleza Street – the first major gallery in Puerto Rico – and the Tinaja del Arte Gallery in Old San Juan.
With the money he saved in Puerto Rico, Izquierdo bought himself an abandoned property in Pennsylvania, near a Quaker community. He shut himself up for days on end, painting day and night, without eating or drinking, until he lost his senses. One day, physically and mentally exhausted, he gave up painting. For the next 15 years he dedicated himself solely to making handcrafts to earn his living. In a way, he blamed painting for his mental breakdowns. And as a result, he punished painting by ignoring it. It was not until many years later that he suddenly woke one day with an urge to paint and started on an enormous mural, which he then completed with an ease that left him amazed at his capacity for work.
In 1974, accompanied by a man who had been his friend since the beginning, the Colombian painter Mario García, a sophisticated and talented playboy, he visited Bogota. It was love at first sight: he so fell in love with Bogotá that he made the trip to Pennsylvania to rent out his property so that he could return to live in Bogotá. After two months in that city, he was convinced that Bogota was where he wanted to spend the rest of his life. On his second visit, he and two friends bought a small island in the Rosario Islands, near Cartagena de Indias. He later sold it and his property in Pennsylvania, as well, with the intention of settling down for good in Bogotá, where he returned to stay in 1977.
In La Candelaria, a neighborhood of beautiful colonial architecture, he bought a house on whose large property he built a number of small studios that helped him make ends meet until 1980, when he began to exhibit his work at the ‘Galería Belarca’, one of the most prestigious art galleries of Bogotá. The Peruvian painter Armando Villegas introduced him to the ‘Galería Meindl’, belonging to a distinguished Austrian immigrant. Izquierdo exhibited his works there, as well, until Meindl passed away.
When Izquierdo took up painting again, he had the vision of a planet whose circumference gradually peels off in layers, becoming fragments exploding into space. During his career as an artist, he had explored painting from various perspectives, including night scenes with dark colors and baroque clouds. He was also interested in cupolas in dripping colors during a religiously inclined, mystic phase. From there, he moved on to the sculptures of cathedrals and monks, themes he would return to every so often, and his constructions of fantastic machinery, which have been so popular among the collectors of his work.
His imaginary artifacts of colorful atmospheres possess the intensity of the vapors that billow from their boiling cauldrons. In his paintings, one feels the roar of machines in an oppressive atmosphere of screeching factories shooting out sparks of feverish activity, matching the vitality lent to his oil paintings by the mechanical articulations in an age of accelerated industrialization.
However, more than a tangible reality, his compositions give him the opportunity to express his artistic interest of poetic symbolism through dynamic brushstrokes of diffuse colors, although his use of color at times acquires a vigorous visual vehemence. The metamorphoses of his images appear like a dream full of enigmatic connotations that dissolve into the ambiguity of a depicted content that fluctuates between a fantasy of the senses and daily urban reality.
By virtue of the quality of his painting and his distinguished artistic career in Colombia and the rest of Latin America, Domingo Izquierdo is among the select number of great masters who have contributed through their work to shape the artistic personality of the Western world in the twentieth century.
Translated by Gleen Taylor
