Edward Avedisian, 1936-2007

Edward would be irritated that anyone was posting on the net about his life or death; I wish I could hear his tart response to this remembrance.

But then Edward's way was to be irritable about everything and everyone, except his partner Judson. That irasciblity was what we liked about him, along with his pleasingly peculiar artwork.

Reclusive, eccentric, misanthropic, Edward was my neighbor in Hudson for nearly a decade. While his 60s abstract paintings are in major collections (the Whitney, MOMA, et al.), he renounced the art world in the 70s, and for the past few decades has been painting landscapess, mostly in seclusion, which became more and more odd and intriguing as the years passed.

He was the crankiest of cranks. All of his friends have stories of Edward making unspeakably rude and offensive remarks. Many of his patrons threw up their hands in exasperation after trying to be supportive, and getting little but abuse in return. Edward couldn't abide small talk, and would snap at almost any characterization of his work, especially if the comment was flattering.

He was not overeager to be understood, either personally or in his art. At some level, I think Edward probably did want to be well-known and even liked, but strictly on his own terms. And he was self-possessed enough to accept becoming less known and less liked, if that was necessary to maintain his personality and the integrity of his work. You just had to learn not to take anything he said personally.

Locally, the story goes that Edward packed up one day in Manhattan, leaving his wife behind, taking up with a biker guy, and decamping upstate -- where he has been hiding out and leading an almost off-the-grid existence ever since in a crumbling Federal building on Hudson's Warren Street. Some say the critic and curator Henry Geldzahler helped him buy the Hudson house (where Geldzahler's then-boyfriend Chris Scott also lived until his death in 2004).

Edward had an acid aversion to the art world, and only in recent years did he grudgingly agree to allow a few of these to be shown again, garnering mostly positive reviews in the New York Times and Art in America.

Avedisian was a true artist in that he never painted for any audience except himself -- and the mild-mannered Judson, the biker, who fed and drove and looked after Edward in every way. (He predeceased Edward by a little more than a year, and to be honest few expected Edward to last long without Judson, even with help.)

His bio at gallerist Carrie Haddad's website says:

In the 1960's, Edward Avedisian was one of the youngest of those luminaries producing a grand new abstract painting. Shown first at Ivan Karp and Dick Bellamy's Hansa Gallery and then at Robert Elkon, Avedisian's insouciant mix of pop playfulness, color field cool and high formalist style put his art in a unique, and at the time generously rewarded, position. Paintings made it onto the cover of Artforum, were purchased by all the major museums, were among the few abstract works shown as representative of America's post-war achievement at Expo 67 in Montreal and comprised a cornerstone in histories of the period written by Barbara Rose, among others.

Yet, Avedisian left New York in the mid-1970's, moving upstate along the Hudson River, severing his exhibition ties. Had Avedisian merely left New York City to establish his studio in a quieter place once his position was secure, had he continued to develop the abstraction for which he became known, then this would be just another permutation of the life lived by many successful artists of his generation. But, as these new paintings indicate, Avedisian's break was far more deeply expressed.

Over the past twenty years Avedisian has developed a new style: figurative, ostensibly naive, contentious. The world Avedisian paints is that of his upstate environs and he does so with a disarming directness. At the core of his new paintings lay a furtive sense of narrative: tow pick-ups are parked beside a farmhouse, a couple repose behind roadside billboards, men work on their trucks. Avedisian, always contemporary, has evolved into a different kind of American painter. After becoming a cosmopolitan maestro in the sophisticated symphony of sixties abstract painting, Avedisian has become provincial in the most explicit sense. It will be an interesting reconciliation between Avedisian's early achievement and his mature work. This mature work is, in many ways, a challenge.

Indeed, his work does more than absorb or divert you for a moment. It does challenge the viewer to take a fresh look at the world through an unexpected and strange lens. Ignorant observers may dismiss Edward's mature work as naive, unschooled, even clumsy; more thoughtful viewers can't help but be struck by the sophisticated color and composition. Any perceived ungainliness in the lines and forms is deliberate, intended to cause a double-take. Once his cockeyed aesthetic becomes familiar, it turns up all over the map: in a misshapen tree, or a towering snowbank, or gathering rainclouds, or a beat-up pickup truck, or a billboard in the wilderness, or a hooded figure walking down an alleyway at sunset. You come to see the world through Edward's eyes, and to notice Avedisianscapes everywhere.

Landscape painting is one of the more difficult forms to master without falling into cliche. But Edward managed to avoid the merely picturesque or hackneyed -- not by being cool and reserved, but by not shying away from the sentiment, colors, communities and sexuality that moved him. Edward and Judson loved nothing better than to drive in the rougher countryside of Greene County and beyond (where they were not infrequently busted for marijuana). Many of his post-abstract paintings seek to document these landscapes being enjoyed by pairs of men. He also had a taste for the gritty urban cityscapes of Hudson and Catskill, often painting composite images which capture the quality of both better than a more literal intepretation could.

His handling of form is genuinely weird, and to my mind original. If comparisons to other artist are necessary, it could be said that he shared the lumpy aesthetic of late Philip Guston, with the saturated color sense of David Hockney; but that still doesn't fully capture what Edward was up to, and he'd hate both comparisons.

There are many tales, some of them tall, about Edward's unusual way of being. He and Judson lived in just a few rooms of their spacious brick home, much of it unheated. Their back porch and yard were overgrown with vines and weeds, and strewn with found objects, some indistinguishable from trash. For the past year, a tattered white tarp was stuck high in a tree, and would wave in the cold winds coming down from Canada as if surrendering to pirate ships on the Hudson River.

He did not suffer visitors gladly, and few got into the house unless he needed money, which he'd raise in a hurry by selling a painting for much less than its worth. Most buyers were allowed past a bare front room, furnished with a beat-up couch and the four or five paintings he was satisfied with at the moment. It seems he was a stern critic of his own work: the remains of a previous, evidently unsatisfactory painting can often be detected through brushstrokes behind the upper layers of his paintings.

Edward did enjoy scaring the bejeebus out of friends and plumbers by taking them down to the dirt basement, which appeared to be full of recently-dug graves. These eerie mounds were in fact the household's preferred means of disposing of kitty litter, both he and Judson being great feeders of felines, domestic and stray. In addition to cats, he was (like the literary critic Harold Bloom) an unabashed fan of trashy cable television; he could often be spotted in a high side window of his house, watching the street with one eye, and a flickering TV with another.

Another bit of (believable) hearsay involves an complaint in the 80s lodged against Edward for failing to cut the waist-high grass in his backyard. A Hudson policeman arrived and demanded a look. Departing from his usual reluctance to show the house, Edward made sure the policeman got a good eyeful of Judson's elaborate collages of hundreds of pictures of penises, the many cat bowls, the ramshackle kitchen, and so on. By the time they reached the back porch, the square cop was plenty ill at ease, but managed to point out the offending weeds. Edward is said to have replied: "Oh, no, that is an extremely rare Japanese grass, an endangered species, the EPA would be here in a second if I cut it..." Unsure of himself in these weird surroundings, fixed by the intense stare of his ghostly suspect, the policeman was glad to have this flimsy excuse to beat a hasty retreat, and the tall grasses remained.

He enjoyed scandalizing people with his caustic comments, but I never felt he did so for show or even out of malice; he was just as likely to take himself down a peg. The complaints were not simply gratuitous; every conversation with Edward would make you think twice about some assumption you'd mad (about Hudson, or a mutual acquaintance, or life in general). He did, over the years, become estranged from many friends and patrons due to his impossible attitude. But it was just the way he was built. I considered it a small miracle that we remained on good terms during the years living at 32 Warren.

I'm most fortunate to have a terrific Avedisian painting of a kelly green house and a forest-green conifer covered in snow, set against a flat cobalt-blue sky, with tree stumps and a car in the foreground (poorly reproduced above). Avedisian's odd juxtapositions of round and pointy shapes, along with the perfectly-pitched shadows cast by two leafless maples, are unified by color to radiate a convincing late afternoon light. It could be Troy, or Catskill, or Hudson, or Saugerties. Out of the corner of an eye, the painting seems spotlit even when it is not. Nothing in the painting is accurate in any sense of academic drawing, but this understated painting immerses you into a fully realized, vivid world. Roberta Smith wrote of this image:

The recent landscapes evoke the early modernist landscape traditions (Fauvism, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Munch), but with a contemporary sense of scale, surface and off-handedness. The best is a winter scene in which two bare trees cast lavender shadows on the side of a light turquoise garage, giving the thick semi-abstract forms a sudden sense of worldly space.

Having no pretensions to living well by any conventional measure, Edward and Judson preferred Hudson the way they found it in the 70s: depressed, falling down, beset by crime. So Edward took any opportunity he could get to tell new arrivals to scram back whence they came. He frequently denounced the civic and domestic improvements he'd watched over the years; it was impossible to get him to register to vote, though I tried every couple of years.

When I moved to Hudson, Edward tweaked this first-time home owner with piercing comments intended to deter me from going overboard in fixing up my house, and he mostly succeeded. Those who would sanitize and gussy up places like Hudson have much to be learn from his attitude of leaving solidly-built, well-made things well enough alone -- rather than gilding the lily (though his own house could have used at least a little gilding, for comfort's sake). Watching the literally organic development of his backyard, full of trophies of their forays into the hills plus stuff they just couldn't be bothered to haul to the dump, one got a whiff of Appalachia in the Hudson Valley. He and Judson were in their own way the ideal neighbors: never noisy, rarely seen, but always provocative conversationalists on the rare occasions they did emerge to get some sustenance at a neighborhood potluck.

Though not everyone was willing to put up with Edward's complaints, still he enjoyed a ton of support in the last difficult years from a number of friends, notably Carrie Haddad, Wilson Kidde, and Whitney Spooner. I sincerely hope that his work, which is all he really cared about besides Judson and the cats, will be well taken care of. Now that he is gone (and his aversion to the art world with him), one hopes and expects that the small recent revival in interest in his work will lead to a more thorough rediscovery and celebration of what he accomplished -- which was not just considerable, but utterly sui generis.

A number of his late paintings can be found at the Haddad Gallery in the 600 block of Warren Street in Hudson. One block down, modern collector/dealer Mark Mcdonald also is known to have a fair sampling of Avedisians, including early work, though not necessarily on site.