Patrick Webb (artist)

Last updated
Patrick Webb
Born1955
New York, New York, United States
NationalityAmerican
Education Yale University, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art
Known forPainting
Awards John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Academy Museum, National Endowment for the Arts, Ingram Merrill Foundation
Website Patrick Webb

Patrick Webb (born 1955) is an American artist who has portrayed contemporary queer experience through representational narrative paintings. [1] [2] [3] He is best known for his "Punchinello" paintings, begun in the early 1990s, which feature a gay "everyman" based on the Italian commedia dell'arte stock character, Pulcinella. [4] [5] [6] Art historians Jonathan D. Katz and Jonathan Weinberg place Webb among artists who that gave voice to the loss and grief associated with the AIDS epidemic by looking beyond the message-heavy activist art and anti-expressive postmodernism of the 1980s to reinvigorated art-historical narrative traditions. [1] [2] [7] Writers note his work for its classically influenced technique and pathos in fleshing out fears, fantasies, experiences and social dichotomies between self and Other, individual and collective, personal and sociocultural. [8] [9] [10] He draws on pictorial strategies from old masters as well as modern artists such as Balthus, Jacob Lawrence, Philip Guston and the magic realist Jared French, building scenarios out of architecturally structured compositions, carefully placed elements and precise gestures. [11] [12] [13]

Contents

Patrick Webb, Punchinello in America, oil on canvas, 108" x 255", 1995. Patrick Webb Punchinello In America 1995.jpg
Patrick Webb, Punchinello in America, oil on canvas, 108" x 255", 1995.

Webb has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016) and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Academy Museum, among others. [14] [15] He has been a professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn since 1995 and lives with his husband, a psychoanalyst, in New York City. [16] [9] [17]

Early life and career

Webb was born in New York City in 1955. [18] He grew up in a culturally rich environment that included museum and opera visits with his mother, a painter and sculptor, and his father, a partner at Noonday Press; intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin were among their social circle. [9] [19] Webb studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (BFA, 1976), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1977), and Yale University (MFA, 1979) with a classical orientation that focused on observational painting, the analysis of art-historical compositions, and the duplication of old-master techniques. [9] [15]

After graduating, Webb taught at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and Cornell University, before moving to New York City in 1983. [9] [15] By that time, he had begun to exhibit in Boston (Alpha Gallery) and New York (Odyssia Galleries); [9] [20] over the next decade, he would be featured in group exhibitions at the Butler Institute of American Art, Minnesota Museum of American Art and Clocktower Gallery ("Positive Actions: Visual AIDS," 1990), among others. [18] [21] In his later career, Webb has been featured at institutions including the Provincetown Art Museum (2008, 25-year survey), Bronx Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. [22] [7] [15] [17]

Webb's early work depicted figures with a playful eroticism in city scenes and landscapes informed by artists such as Edwin Dickinson. [21] [22] According to Nancy Grimes, in that work he sought a visual language to express gay experience "in an unembarrassed, straightforward manner, free from cliché and sentimentality." [21] [9] By the late 1980s, with the increasing threat and tragedy of the AIDS epidemic, Webb turned to desperate and angry, monumental images of street battles, fires and parades, with queer identity emerging as a more pronounced theme. [23] [21] He often reworked classical paintings in these canvasses, undermining mainstream cultural and sexual norms, as in the six-by-eighteen-foot triptych, Halloween Parade (1989), an allegory of death inspired by the annual Greenwich Village parade, which restaged Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar in queer terms. [21]

Patrick Webb, Punchinello Works Out: Shiva, oil on canvas, 46" x 22", 1999. Patrick Webb Punchinello Works Out Shiva 1999.jpg
Patrick Webb, Punchinello Works Out: Shiva, oil on canvas, 46" x 22", 1999.

"Punchinello" paintings

In 1990, Webb began painting works that reinterpreted Pulcinella—a masked, red-beaked commedia dell'arte trickster or fool he encountered in the work of Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo—as a contemporary gay everyman, "Punchinello," who would serve as a malleable, repeatable protagonist and surrogate in his work. [8] [24] [9] He was drawn to the character’s clownish naivete, his sexually provocative, phallic red nose and white hat, and mask, which marked him as a cipher-like outsider who could be simultaneously specific, anonymous and universal. [25] [10] [26] Writers suggest that these qualities lend a tragic-comic poignancy and alienated, determined heroism to the character as he struggles for individuality and identity through rites of passage, everyday experiences, social conflict, and being a witness to and sufferer within the AIDS crisis. [25] [11] Webb has described the Punchinello paintings as reflecting "the humanist belief that human experience is what matters." [9]

Early "Punchinello" paintings (1990–9)

Poet Stanley Kunitz described Webb's early cycles as "brilliant and mordant evocations of a twentieth-century Carnival of Death [that] confront the terrible with an irony that enriches and deepens the ultimate pathos." [27] Much of this work was featured in his first New York solo exhibition at Amos Eno Gallery in 1993. [21] His first cycle, Punchinello: A Life, 1957–1990, offered a terse narrative in five diptychs, tracing a journey from birth through adolescence and sexual awakening to adulthood and premature death from a disease suggesting AIDS. [21] The diptych, Lamentation / By Punchinello's Bed (1990–2), was inspired by the artist's hospital visit to his dying and then deceased boyfriend, Chris Kales, who while suffering from AIDS was only reluctantly touched by caregivers. The work draws on Christian martyr iconography and was included in the traveling historical survey, "Art AIDS America" (2015–7); it belongs to the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. [28] [29] [1] The diptych took on personal significance as a representation of Webb's experience of witnessing his lover’s death and anticipating his own death after he also tested positive for HIV. [8] [9] Poet Mark Doty has written that Punchinello's mask provided a "safe distance" allowing Webb to "portray the sorrows of the AIDS epidemic with a particularly compelling gravity and grace." [25] In the four-painting cycle, Punchinello in America (1995, 9' x 22' mural composition), Webb's focus turned from loss to anger, portraying the character fighting back in street demonstrations and court, being brutally lynched, and ultimately emerging victorious. [4] [9]

In two later cycles, Webb explored corporeality, vulnerability, and the world of the body as an allegory for his own revitalization and the discovery that he was not dying. [30] [12] "Punchinello Goes West" (1996) was inspired by a trip to West Texas and comprised 18 sequential paintings portraying a playful and poignant journey into American myth. They present Punchinello testing himself in the open landscape and rodeo, running with the Javalinas, and having encounters in saloons and bunkhouses. [25] [30] [8] The "Punchinello Works Out" series (1997–2001) explored mortality, age and desire through depictions of him as a frail figure straining alongside buff men in a subterranean New York gym. The images—of compressed spaces fragmented by mirrors and machines—took Webb's work in a flatter, more abstract direction, highlighting the sense of structure and pattern that had always underlaid his painting. [30] [9]

Patrick Webb, Sunday Brunch, oil on canvas, 36" x 32", 2003. Patrick Webb Sunday Brunch 2003.jpg
Patrick Webb, Sunday Brunch, oil on canvas, 36" x 32", 2003.

Later "Punchinello" paintings (2000– )

Webb's work in the 2000s increasingly suggested Punchinello's transition from doomed character to survivor. [5] [31] Several cycles—"Home" (2003–5), "Married Life," and "Punchinello Unloads" (both 2007–10)—place him in ordinary, intimate or comically sad domestic narratives or heavy manual-labor scenarios. [32] [11] Other works coupled erotic attraction and menace. These include the "Cheat" series (2004–5), Punchinello and the Law: Contra Natum (2000)—which depicts him trying to be inconspicuous as he walks past an unsmiling, mustached beat cop—or Saved II (2002–3) and Fallen (2001–3), in which he is rescued by a fireman and a paramedic. [9] [32] A later cycle casts him in populated New York streets as various opera persona (e.g., Punchinello as Figaro, 2007–10); ARTnews critic Alex Taylor described the juxtaposition of unremarkable city scenes and the character's slightly bewildering masked presence as conveying a "beauty in strangeness" and "eerie sense of dislocation." [5] [31] City Art noted the work of this period for its "finely sculpted faces, rhythmic silhouettes and minutely choreographed gestures," likening it to paintings by Piero della Francesca and Balthus. [11]

The work in Webb's exhibitions "Night and Day" (2011) and "On the Beach at Night" (2012) reintegrated landscape into his work and was a departure from the light, high-keyed colors of his daytime street scenes. Metaphors for life and death, these paintings were inspired by memory, childhood experiences of Cape Cod, and the deaths of his mother and father. [9] [22] They echoed Baroque Tenebrist paintings and were among his most abstract and least figurative works to date, with largely implied forms—Punchinello among family, in bacchanals with other men disrobing and rolling around—emerging out of nocturnal seaside bonfire scenes that Webb studied firsthand by sketching direct paintings on the beach with a spelunking light strapped to his forehead. [9]

Patrick Webb, Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor, oil on canvas, 60" x 119", 2013-9. Patrick Webb Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor 2013-9.jpg
Patrick Webb, Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor, oil on canvas, 60" x 119", 2013–9.

Between 2013 and 2018, Webb created his atmospheric, sixty-two-canvas "Tinker Tailor" series, which uses the British nursery rhyme as a launching point for a carnivalesque world of Punchinellos incarnating multiple identities, anachronistic activities, childhood experiences and screen memories. [33] [10] [13] Jonathan Katz called the masked character an apt figuration of queerness: a "fraught combination of a camouflaged, yet excessive, performance of selfhood." [33] In 2020, Webb created "The COVID Paintings," a wide-ranging series that connects that epidemic and its associated isolation to his earlier works about HIV, while drawing on themes and paintings from throughout his career and art history. [10] [26] One of these works, Covid: Central Park, was awarded the Gold Medal for the competitive exhibition "Covid Dreams" sponsored by Artavita. [34]

Awards and recognition

Webb has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2016), Art Matters (1992), and the National Endowment for the Arts (1988, 1986, 1984). [15] He has received awards from the National Academy Museum (Thomas B. Clarke Award in Painting, 1988), the Ingram Merrill Foundation (1995, 1989) and Artavita (2020). [26] [15] [34] In addition to teaching at Pratt, he has been a visiting artist at Cranbrook, Johns Hopkins University, Maryland Institute College of Art, Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University, among others. [15]

Webb's work belongs to the public collections of the Boston Public Library, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, [35] Provincetown Art Association and Museum, [36] Queensboro College Museum (CUNY), Rose Art Museum, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, and Zimmerli Art Museum, in addition to several corporate collections. [15] His paintings are reproduced in several books on American art, including Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art (2005) by Jonathan Weinberg, Art AIDS America (2015) by Jonathan Katz and Rock Hushka, and Queer Holdings: A Survey of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Collection (2020). [2] [28] [3] [37] [38]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ross Bleckner</span> American artist

Ross Bleckner is an American artist. He currently lives and works in New York City. His artistic focus is on painting, and he held his first solo exhibition in 1975. Some of his art work reflected on the AIDS epidemic.

Richard Theodore Titlebaum was a writer, artist, antiquarian book collector and literature professor.

Geoffrey Hendricks was an American artist associated with Fluxus since the mid 1960s. He was professor of art at Douglass College, Rutgers University, where he taught from 1956 to 2003 and was associated with Fluxus at Rutgers University, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, and Lucas Samaras during the 1960s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luhring Augustine Gallery</span> Art gallery in New York City

The Luhring Augustine Gallery is an art gallery in New York City. The gallery has three locations: Chelsea, Bushwick, and Tribeca. Its principal focus is the representation of an international group of contemporary artists whose diverse practices include painting, drawing, sculpture, video and photography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art</span> Visual art museum in New York City, US

The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (LLMA), formerly the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, is a visual art museum in SoHo, Lower Manhattan, New York City. It mainly collects, preserves and exhibits visual arts created by LGBTQ artists or art about LGBTQ+ themes, issues, and people. The museum, operated by the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation, offers exhibitions year-round in numerous locations and owns more than 22,000 objects, including, paintings, drawings, photography, prints and sculpture. The foundation was awarded Museum status by the New York State Board of Regents in 2011 and was formally accredited as a museum in 2016. The museum is a member of the American Alliance of Museums and operates pursuant to their guidelines. As of 2019, the LLMA was the only museum in the world dedicated to artwork documenting the LGBTQ experience.

Irving Sandler was an American art critic, art historian, and educator. He provided numerous first hand accounts of American art, beginning with abstract expressionism in the 1950s. He also managed the Tanager Gallery downtown and co-ordinated the New York Artists Club of the New York School from 1955 to its demise in 1962 as well as documenting numerous conversations at the Cedar Street Tavern and other art venues. Al Held named him, "Our Boswell of the New York scene," and Frank O'Hara immortalized him as the "balayeur des artistes" because of Sandler's constant presence and habit of taking notes at art world events. Sandler saw himself as an impartial observer of this period, as opposed to polemical advocates such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.

Patrick Angus (1953–1992) was a 20th-century American painter who, among many other works, created a number acrylic paintings of the interior of the Gaiety Theater and some of its dancers and customers in the 1980s. Some of the titles are: Grand Finale (1985), The Apollo Room I (1986), Remember the Promise You Made (1986), Slave to the Rhythm (1986), All The Love in the World (1987), and Hanky Panky (1991).

Lesbian feminist art activist collective fierce pussy was founded in 1991 in New York City. It is committed to art action in association with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. The group uses lower case letters for their name in part because it is non-hierarchical. fierce pussy, as a collective, speaks of themselves as a singular person. This is consistent in an interview on their 2018-19 window installation at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. In the interview, fierce pussy states that "you don't need to refer to us as individual artists, all responses from our side are by fierce pussy. We are fierce pussy."

Harmony Hammond is an American artist, activist, curator, and writer. She was a prominent figure in the founding of the feminist art movement in 1970s New York.

Karen Heagle is an American artist, known for autobiographical and art historical subject matter. Her work comments on contemporary culture through a queer perspective with a focus on feminist agendas.

Larry Stanton was a Manhattan-based portrait artist whose work was championed by David Hockney, Henry Geldzahler, Ellsworth Kelly and others. He was a gay man who lived in Greenwich Village in New York City.

Anthony Viti is an American artist who lives and works at Brooklyn, New York. He is a visual artist and an art educator. Viti currently teaches at School of Visual Arts and Parsons.

Troy Montes-Michie is an American interdisciplinary painter and collage artist.

Clarity Haynes is a queer feminist American artist and writer. She currently lives and works in New York, NY. Haynes is best known for her unconventional painted portraits of torsos, focusing on queer, trans, cis female and nonbinary bodies. She is a former member of the tART Collective and the Corpus VI Collective.

Gonzalo E. Casals is an Argentine-American museum director and professor based in New York City. He is the former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and previously held the executive director position at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York. He was the Vice President of Programs and Community Engagement at Friends of the High Line, as well as the Deputy and Interim Director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. He is a resident of Jackson Heights, Queens.

Shari Diamond is a queer American feminist artist and educator. Diamond uses they/them gender pronouns. Diamond was born in Miami Beach, Florida and earned an M.A. in Photography from New York University / International Center of Photography. They currently live in Newburgh, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frederick Weston</span> American painter

Frederick Weston (1946–2020) was an American interdisciplinary artist. Self-taught, he worked in collage, drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, and creative writing. He was raised in Detroit, Michigan and moved to New York City in the mid-1970s. Over the course of his time in New York, he developed a vast, encyclopedic archive of images and ephemera related to fashion, the body, advertising, AIDS, and queer subjects through his various jobs and social presence in hustler bars and gay nightlife. His early collages and photography, which often utilized likenesses of patrons, highlighted the social and communal nature of such institutions. Continuing this theme, in the mid-1990s, he became co-founder of guerrilla artist group Underground Railroad, which produced street art and outdoor installations. In his lifetime, he exhibited to small audiences in non-traditional art spaces and only in the last two years of his life did his work become widely known and appreciated in urban art circles.

Scooter LaForge is an American artist based in New York's East Village. He is a painter and sculptor, and has a line of clothing for Patricia Field and has collaborated with other fashion designers. LaForge's work is "inspired by the old masters, cute fluffy animals, and sometimes iconic cartoons," drawing from a number of pop culture and artistic references, ranging from Disney and Popeye to Keith Haring and Rembrandt.

Joey Terrill is an American Chicano queer visual artist. He works in the mediums of painting, collage, drawing, and photography. His work often pays tribute to gay visual artist, and features Chicano themes. Terrill uses inspiration from cartoons, magazines, 1950s and 1960s art movements, and comics to produce his work. He is based in Los Angeles.

Jenna Gribbon is an American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for her figurative paintings whose primary subject is her partner, Mackenzie Scott. Gribbon frequently depicts Scott in candid, everyday scenes or overtly theatrical setups.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Katz, Jonathan. "Jonathan Katz Discusses Art Related to the AIDS Crisis," ARTnews, April 14, 2020. Retrieved March 22, 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 Weinberg, Jonathan. Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art, New York: Abrams Books, 2005, p. 173–5. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  3. 1 2 Casals, Gonzalo and Noam Parness (eds.). Queer Holdings: A Survey of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Collection, Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2020. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  4. 1 2 Fitzpatrick, Laurie. "Punchinello In America," Art & Understanding, October 1995.
  5. 1 2 3 Taylor, Alex. "David Carbone, Nancy Grimes & Patrick Webb," ARTnews, January 2009.
  6. ↑ Cohen, David. "Punchinello Hits the Gym," The New York Sun, September 24, 2010. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  7. 1 2 Pollack, Barbara. "Protest, Memorial: AIDS in the Art World," ARTnews, May 2014. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Greco, Stephen. "Patrick Webb's Adventures With Punchinello," POZ, December 1996–January 1997. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Gambone, Philip. "Patrick Webb: The Heroic Journey of Punchinello," Provincetown Arts Magazine, 2012, p. 86–9.
  10. 1 2 3 4 Taylor, Sophie. "Patrick Webb on Bodies, Desire, and Punchinello," Art Dealer Street, March 2019. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  11. 1 2 3 4 Goodrich, John. "Patrick Webb: Punchinello as Other and Caren Canier," City Arts, September 14, 2010, p. 12.
  12. 1 2 Izaguirre, Mafe. "Intimacies: Patrick Webb," ROOM, October 19, 2018. Retrieved March 24, 2021.
  13. 1 2 Visual AIDS. Patrick Webb: Tinker Tailor Paintings, Events. Retrieved March 22, 2021.
  14. ↑ Greenberger, Alex. "John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Announces 2016 Fellowships," ARTnews, April 6, 2016. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  15. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Patrick Webb, Fellows. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  16. ↑ Pratt. Patrick Webb, Faculty. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  17. 1 2 Fulcher, Susannah Elisabeth. "Patrick Webb and the Art of Punchinello," Provincetown Independent, August 6, 2020. Retrieved March 24, 2021.
  18. 1 2 Visual AIDS. Patrick Webb, Artists. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  19. ↑ Brown, Susan Rand. "Patrick Webb's Punchinello Is Out at Home," Provincetown Banner, August 16, 2018. Retrieved March 29, 2021.
  20. ↑ Temin, Christine. "Rhythms of New York and Promising Young Talent," The Boston Globe, June 23, 1983.
  21. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Grimes, Nancy. "Punchinello Paintings by Patrick Webb," Patrick Webb: Punchinello Paintings, New York: Amos Eno Gallery, 1993.
  22. 1 2 3 Harrison, Sue. "Webb Finds Truth in Anonymity of an Everyman," Provincetown Banner, March 15, 2008, p. 22.
  23. ↑ Wadas, Walter. "Alone and Embattled," Bay Windows (Boston), December 1986.
  24. ↑ Webb, Patrick. "Punchinello's Journeys," The Georgia Review, Summer 2002, p. 520–8. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  25. 1 2 3 4 Doty, Mark. Punchinello Goes West, Provincetown, MA: Julie Heller Gallery, 1996.
  26. 1 2 3 Contemporary Art Curators. Patrick Webb, Artists, 2021. Retrieved March 22, 2021.
  27. ↑ Kunitz, Stanley. Patrick Webb: 25 Years of Work, Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Museum, 2008.
  28. 1 2 Katz, Jonathan David and Rock Hushka. Art AIDS America, Seattle, WA/London: Tacoma Art Museum with University of Washington Press, 2015. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  29. ↑ Johnson, Steve. "AIDS art gets its first major survey," Chicago Tribune, December 7, 2016. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  30. 1 2 3 Weinberg, Jonathan. Punchinello Works Out, New York: Cortland Jessup Gallery, 1998.
  31. 1 2 Kloppenberg, Brian. "Punchinello as Uncanny Other," Punchinello as Other: Paintings by Patrick Webb, New York: The Painting Center, 2010.
  32. 1 2 Provincetown Art Museum. Patrick Webb: 25 Years of Work, Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Museum, 2008.
  33. 1 2 Katz, Jonathan. "The Rare Mask that Identifies Its Wearer," The Tinker Tailor Paintings: Patrick Webb, 2019.
  34. 1 2 Artavita. Contest with Theme: COVID Dreams, Contests. Retrieved March 22, 2021.
  35. ↑ Leslie-Lohman Museum Art. Artists in the Collection, Collection. Retrieved March 29, 2021.
  36. ↑ Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Patrick Webb, The Lamentation, Object. Retrieved March 29, 2021.
  37. ↑ Bruno Gmunder Verlag GmbH. Completely Stripped, Munich: Bruno Gmunder Verlag GmbH, 2010. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
  38. ↑ Forman, Deborah. Cape Cod Artists: People and Places, Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2014.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.