Jay Milder: Broadway Nonstop, Subway Paintings from the 1950s - 60s
Eric Firestone Gallery | 40 Great Jones Street | New York, NY
April 1 - May 14, 2022
Jay Milder: Broadway Nonstop: Subway Paintings From The 1950s and 60s
Jay Milder (b. 1934, Omaha, Nebraska), first exhibited his “Subway Runners” series at Martha Jackson Gallery, NY, in 1964. These paintings, based on the subject of people running to catch trains, are explosive in their energy and materiality: dense, three-dimensional surfaces of oil paint mixed with volcanic ash. The faces and heads are huge, dominating most of the canvas, with arms and legs in motion, and the setting of subway stations and tracks depicted with loose, gestural marks.
The work is connected to European sources like Dubuffet and COBRA artists; Milder lived in Paris and studied with André Lhote and Ossip Zadkine in the mid-1950s. There, he also became aware of the work of Chaim Soutine, who would be an important influence in terms of a gestural, painterly approach to Cubism enlivened by spiritual belief. Milder’s early travels to Morroco and Mexico also informed his early development.
In the summer of 1958, Milder lived in Provincetown, where he came into contact with Red Grooms and Bob Thompson, and showed at the Sun Gallery alongside Mimi Gross, Alex Katz, and Lester Johnson. Milder became associated with a “second-generation New York School” Figurative Expressionism. Back in New York, he co-founded, with Red Grooms, the artist-run City Gallery in their shared loft in the Flatiron District, giving Claes Oldenberg and Jim Dine their first New York exhibitions.
1960 Jay Milder with Bob Thompson - Zabriskie Gallery.
Jay Milder and Bob Thompson [Zabriskie; to June Il] make a lively show. Milder is the more mature. His oils are supposed to be still-lifes. In one, a huge table top, as doughy and vast as a dry river bed in Africa, reaches to the far horizon under the hovering mirage of a window sill. In another, three cabbages, giant swirls of black green, look like the churned wake of a docking ocean liner. Influenced by Lester Johnson, Milder's canvases seem to heave with an obscure romanticism, and though not in the least explicit, some sort of urge or struggle is brewing under the surface. Thompson, too, is a recent uptown arrival from Delancey Street. With him painting is a question of whimsical ideas. Dreams, a carnival of naked figures with ominous imps and wooden pets, are deployed in a never-never land of sexual freedom. In patch-work jungles, under lollypop trees, near rivers of lurid magenta, gawky, climbing, coupling, the population of Thompson's fancy enjoys itself. In the least strident of the canvases, with a coloring close to Art Nouveau, one might see a primer type of Arcadia--it is titled I see and people grow in it like a carpet of flowers. These awkward fables, influenced by Jan Müller, were invented by an obviously young talent. Not its shoots of imagination, but its form and color need pruning and ripening.
Jay Milder
Blue Face Runner, 1962
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
48h x 48w in
121.92h x 121.92w cm
JMIL031
Jay Milder
Subway Runner #13, 1958
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
36h x 36w in
91.44h x 91.44w cm
JMIL004
Jay Milder
Subway Runner (Spray 4), 1960
oil, spray paint and volcanic ash on canvas
56h x 60w in
142.24h x 152.40w cm
JMIL034
Jay Milder
Turquoise Runner, 1963
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
75 3/4h x 68 3/4w in
192.41h x 174.63w cm
JMIL035
Jay Milder
Yellow Subway Runner, 1963
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
66h x 66w in
167.64h x 167.64w cm
JMIL015
Jay Milder
Subway Runner BMT, 1963
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
69 1/4h x 86w in
175.90h x 218.44w cm
JMIL013
Jay Milder
Subway Woman #2, 1964
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
68h x 64w in
172.72h x 162.56w cm
JMIL021
Jay Milder
Red Subway Runner, 1964
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
69h x 69w in
175.26h x 175.26w cm
JMIL014
Jay Milder
Hamlet, 1961
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
48h x 48w in
121.92h x 121.92w cm
JMIL036
Jay Milder
Untitled, 1963
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
30h x 24w in
76.20h x 60.96w cm
JMIL079
Jay Milder
Untitled, 1964
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
36h x 36w in
91.44h x 91.44w cm
JMIL060
Jay Milder
Subway Runner, 1963
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
69h x 69w in
175.26h x 175.26w cm
JMIL017
Jay Milder
Subway Runner #8, 1958
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
22h x 23 1/2w in
55.88h x 59.69w cm
JMIL006
Jay Milder
Lime Subway Runner, 1962-63
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
69h x 69w in
175.26h x 175.26w cm
JMIL020
Jay Milder
Untitled, 1962
oil and volcanic ash on canvas
48h x 48w in
121.92h x 121.92w cm
JMIL085
Portrait of Jay Milder in front of a Subway Painting.
Milder was inspired by the energy and motion, history, and constant flux of the city. The surfaces of his paintings are emblematic of layers of paint and grit on building walls. He experimented, early on, with spray paint, and added volcanic ash to pigment to create a coarse impasto. This, along with his subject matter of the subway, have led art historians to connect his work to street art. Over the decades, the constant in his work has been what he terms “figurative symbolism” and a belief that paintings should convey a sense of the connection between mystical experience and material presence. Milder says, “If you don’t have joy, you don’t have anything.” Milder co-founded, with Red Grooms, the artist-run City Gallery in their shared loft in the Flatiron District, giving Claes Oldenberg and Jim Dine their first New York exhibitions. In 1959, the City Gallery’s operations expanded to a studio loft run by Grooms, Milder, and Bob Thompson on the Lower East Side. The new gallery would become known as the Delancey Street Museum: an early site for “happenings,” including the first performances by Allan Kaprow.
1964 Yale Poster for Seven Younger Painters.
“As early 1960, Thomas Hess, a highly astute critic, who as editor of Art News was also very influential, noted that "the new figurative painting which some have been expecting as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism was implicit in it at the start, and is one of its most linear continuities." But it is in recent years that a prevalent pluralism has been able to re-examine the past and reinstate the maverick New York figure painters like George McNeil, Robert Beauchamps, Lester Johnson, Bob Thompson, Jan Muller, and Jay Milder, whose inner direct energy eschewed the cool stance of Pop and also of the Expressionists before them, resulted in iconoclastic work, which was an embodiment of genuine emotion - not the grandiose replication of previously felt forms which the so-called Neo-Expressionists have recently been serving to the insatiable art market." - Peter Selz,
Former Director of the Museum of Modern Art NYC, Monograph, Jay Milder: Urban Visionary, Solo Exhibition, curated by Martha Henry, July 1991.
Jay Milder
Subway Runners, 1964
gouache on paper
31 1/2h x 35w in
80.01h x 88.90w cm
JMIL009
Jay Milder
Subway People IV, 1964
gouache on paper
29 3/4h x 35w in
75.56h x 88.90w cm
JMIL010
Jay Milder
Subway Runner (Pink), 1964
gouache on paper
36h x 35w in
91.44h x 88.90w cm
JMIL012
Jay Milder
Subway Runner, 1964
gouache on paper
32 1/4h x 35 1/4w in
81.92h x 89.53w cm
JMIL052
Jay Milder
Subway Runner (Pink), 1964
gouache on paper
36h x 35w in
91.44h x 88.90w cm
JMIL012
1967 4-Man Paintings, St. Marks Place Exhibition Poster.
Excerpts from Jay Milder’s Interview with Dr. Jusep Torres Campanals, Jr.
Rhino Horn: Personal Interiors, 1974
To make any movement modern or viable or palatable for a certain age, it has to be something new. It can't be the same old shit drawn out. ... If you think of [the work of Leonel Góngora], for example, it's kind of poetic, allegorical parable. And it does something to the mind. Aside from the aesthetics of the work—the colors and the rhythms—it asks the mind to think, "What is it?" And in the process of thinking "What is it?" one does think of all the aspects of our times. Man needs some kind of mythology today.
—Jay Milder, 1974
Fred McDarrah photograph of Jay Milder and Bob performing in Kaprow 1959 Happening, Reuben Gallery.
“We live in a bandaid society bereft of
the spirit. Thomas Aquinas made the
Western World material, when be
ushered in the thoughts of Aristotle.
Einstein brought us back to pluralism
and the spirit. For me, painting is a
mantra or an energy field, harmonics,
pulsation. Two of my main influences
were Ornette Coleman and
Shostakovich. Art is nonlinear and
should not be classified in that way”
Jay Milder, 1962
Milder’s work is represented in the collections of the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA; the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; and the Museo Nacional de Arte Centro Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid, Spain. He was the subject of a 1991 retrospective at the New England Center for Contemporary Art. Milder has lived in Brazil, and he was the subject of solo exhibitions in 2006 at the Museum of Modern Art in Salvador, Bahia, and Rio De Janeiro, and, in 2009, at the National Museum of Brazilia. He was the subject of a 2019 retrospective at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum: “Jay Milder: Unblotting the Rainbow.”
JAY MILDER: BROADWAY NONSTOP, Subway Paintings from the 1950s and 60s will be on view through May 14, 2022 Eric Firestone Gallery | 40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY 10012