Norman Gorbaty ~ 2 Exhibitions At The Fairfield University In Connecticut ~ A Rediscovered Master

Written by Jan Ellen Spiegel Thursday, 22 March 2012 23:09

Fairfield, Connecticut (New York Times).- Norman Gorbaty, now 78, has been making artworks, many of them large, for more than half a century. Hundreds, probably thousands, of pieces in more than a dozen media. For most of that time, the pieces were set aside, leaned against a wall, thrown in a drawer or folder, relegated to the basement or attic, and rarely seen by anyone other than friends or relatives. But after Mr. Gorbaty’s wife died in 2003, his son thought that organizing and perhaps showing the art would be therapeutic, so he secretly entered a drawing into a juried show.“It was the clear winner,” recalled the juror, Susan Greenberg Fisher, then associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Yale University Gallery. She described Mr. Gorbaty’s work as “the highest level.” Ms. Fisher was the first of many experts to praise the work as Mr. Gorbaty. Now shared with hundreds of galleries and museums.

The exhibition at the Thomas J. Walsh Gallery ("To Honor My People: Reflections of a Jewish Artist") will run in tandem with "Works in Dialogue" at the Bellarmine Museum of Art, both shows running through March 27. These consitute Mr. Gorbaty’s third solo show. His work was previously displayed at the Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Gallery in Lakeville, Connecticut, in 2008, and at Queens Community College in 2009. Ben Gorbaty says that about a dozen drawings, paintings and pastels have been sold, and that smaller works are priced at $2,500 to $5,000. "To Honor My People" will showcase a dynamic and vital selection of Gorbaty's work never seen before and represents Gorbaty's first comprehensive gallery exhibition of his Judaic works, whilst "Works in DIalogue" highlights the artist's smaller works on paper and his carved "stele."




“He draws like an old master and yet has this contemporary flair,” said Charles Noyes, co-head of the arts department at Hotchkiss. "The wood carvings, the bas reliefs, were stunning,” said Sylvia Herskowitz, then the director of the Yeshiva University Museum in New York. “Very finely done; and to think that he was working all this time and never showing it. I couldn’t understand it.”

Norman Gorbaty, a faux curmudgeon with a twinkle in his hazel blue eyes, trained at Yale with the artist Josef Albers and the architect Louis Kahn, and won a spot in a 1954 Young American Printmakers show at the Museum of Modern Art. But he chose Madison Avenue as a more reliable way to support his new wife and, eventually, two children, becoming art director at Benton & Bowles and then opening his own agency. “I was in advertising at a time that I considered was the great period in advertising,” he said. “We had fun. Oh, God, did we have fun.” Mr. Gorbaty designed ads for Crest toothpaste, Post cereals and I.B.M.’s then-groundbreaking Selectric typewriter, and also created covers for Time magazine, titles for Woody Allen films and illustrations for more than 85 children’s books. But he said he sometimes “felt like a traitor” to fine art. So, night after night, year after year, he created.

There were small carvings and sculptures from ivory, scrimshaw, stone, plaster and even the children’s clay Sculpey. There were enormous wood pieces that fit only in the garage of his home on Long Island. Endless pastels, using the leftovers from the advertising world’s premagic marker days; the occasional oil painting; and, always, drawings (his favorite) in pencil, charcoal, pen, brown ink, even crayon. The subjects were similarly varied, naturescapes and other sights from yearly trips to Europe and elsewhere, portraits, both realistic and abstract and Judaica, a passion borne of his Russian-Jewish heritage and Brooklyn upbringing. Some works reflect religious practices; some explore persecution from the Crusades through World War II. “Struma,” at the Walsh (Mr. Gorbaty’s first all-Judaica exhibition) is named for a ship of Jewish refugees from Romania who died after their boat was set adrift at sea by Turkish officials and then sunk by a Russian submarine.

“To me, the whole thing was the doing,” not the display, Mr. Gorbaty said of his work. “One advantage,” he said, was that because “I was not in art full time, I would do things that weren’t up for criticism. I could just do them and put them away” and not have to field comments like “ ‘Oh, he’s losing it; oh, he’s getting it; oy, he should be making this.’ ” And, he added, “Maybe I was a little scared." Preparing the vast collection for the public was a painstaking task. Works had not been named, cataloged or photographed. “It was ‘CSI’ in the art world,” said Ms. Kaiser. Ben Gorbaty added: “It was just like uncovering a tomb from a dead artist.” Ben Gorbaty and his wife have moved much of Mr. Gorbaty’s large work into storage, though Mr. Gorbaty’s home (which now has a large studio, where he continues to make art) remains stuffed with art, some of it dating to the 1950s. There are pieces, Mr. Gorbaty admitted, that he cannot remember making. “Not only that, I don’t know which is up and which is down on some of them,” he said, laughing.

But sometimes some of his old works stun him. “Boy, could I draw,” he said. “Now it’s not the same. I don’t have the same hand. So now I do other things.” Mr. Gorbaty said that “it would be nice” to be appreciated commercially at this stage, but that he knew it was unlikely. Galleries, he said, prefer younger people who can keep producing. And he does not relish the preparations required for a show like the one now at the Walsh. “It ruins the whole day,” he said. “I can’t wait until this is over so they leave me alone. So I can carve a little statue, do a little this; something that I feel like doing at the time.”




As Norman Gorbaty says on his website: "When I think of my work two words come to mind: Movement and Drawing. These concepts, as I understand, study and explore them, are recurring themes. When I refer to “drawing” I don’t just mean the physical works on paper or the finished picture. I am also referring to the process I use in the actual “doing” of the art. This approach was greatly influenced by both Joseph Albers and Louis Kahn while at Yale. I make a mark. That mark tells me where the next mark should go and so on until the image begins to have a life of its own. It begins to tell me what it wants to be. It's for me to recognize what it wants to be and help it to become that. Sometimes I don’t give in and force a different direction, but again the piece begins to tell me what it wants to be and so on. It is this “doing” of pictures that I am about. I am fascinated by the motion around us and often try to capture this in my work. There is movement in life as we “do” it. Everything moves. Images are constantly in motion. Whether we are physically moving or our surroundings are moving, or just our eye is moving we sense motion constantly. This movement combines with our differing perspectives of an image to create unique experiences which I artistically explore.

My journey formally began over fifty years ago while attending Amherst and Yale. At that time my focus was print-making. My works were shown in Brooklyn Museum's Print Annual for several years and included in a modest show at MOMA entitled Young American Printmakers. At around that time I married Joy, and made a switch to the less risky field of graphic arts in order to provide my family with more certain stability and comfort (or so I told myself). At the same time I continued doing my art outside the confines of my career.

After the passing of Joy, my “Old Beauty” in 2003 I have retired from my career as a graphic artist to focus completely on fine art. Joy was not only my inspiration, but she was also my audience and with her passing I found I have the need to once again show my work in more public forums. Jules Michelet’s quote sums up both my journey and my passion for art: The end is nothing, the road is all. When a picture is finished it no longer belongs to me. You can hang it, show it, look at it, turn its face to the wall, say about it what you want, and do with it what you will. But the doing of the picture is mine. Only I own the doing."

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~