This post, from March 2021, published as the pandemic still raged, seemed to me worth dusting off and updating with both some or the original and newer contributions. So here goes….
I know from hard-won experience that artists can be maddeningly difficult to talk to. While some—Frank Stella and Jim Dine are two who come to mind—were on good terms with the English language and had no difficulty explaining why they do what they do, others could be evasive or downright obtuse. I had a hard time getting Alex Katz to offer much more than monosyllables when I interviewed him 25 years ago (maybe he’s grown more loquacious since), and Marisol, as I recounted in an earlier post about studio visits, would not or could not give me even enough information to fill so much as a paragraph.
Nonetheless, there are artists with whom I would persist just for the faintest glimmer of understanding. No, I really don’t care if Mona Lisa was smiling, pregnant, or suffering gas pains when Leonardo painted her, but I would love to know what he and the feisty collector Isabella d’Este talked about when he drew her portrait. I would be curious to know, too, how Artemisia Gentileschi managed a lover, several children, and a thriving business painting for the Florentine gentry.
But of all the great artists whose brains I would most like to pick (and of course there are many), Édouard Manet is the one I would press the hardest to understand just what the hell is going on in some of his paintings. I remember sitting for a good hour in front of A Bar at the Folies Bergère at the Courtauld in London, reading numerous articles about the mirror, the oranges, the tiny dangling legs in the upper left, and being none the wiser for all my research and careful looking. But maybe after a couple of glasses of absinthe, M Manet would take me by the hand and explain, “Alors, madame….”
I wondered if artists fantasized meeting up with other artists—those they admired or even those whose aims were completely different from their own—and so I put the question to a handful of readers: If you could spend an hour, a day, or share a meal with any artist from history, who would you most want to talk to? What would you ask? What would you tell that artist about what you’re doing?
Here are their answers:
Marina Cappelletto: I would like to have a conversation with Agnes Pelton and Gertrude Abercrombie. If we were to meet up, I would let them know what I appreciated about their work: the silent, meditative quality in Agnes’s, and the unusual juxtapositions in Gertrude’s, and I would share with them that those are also qualities I focus on in my own work. I would like to spend an afternoon in a museum with each of them, discussing the works on display. Since Gertrude was from Chicago, I would meet her at the Art Institute of Chicago, and I would suggest starting with the paintings by Giovanni di Paolo. Agnes spent a good part of her life in Brooklyn, where I live now, so I would meet her at the Brooklyn Museum, and recommend that we start in the Egyptian wing. While making our way through both museums, I would ask them to show me the work each of them found most compelling.
Christine Aaron: Despite the pandemic being in the rearview mirror, there is increased social isolation for so many, reinforced by the insidious nature of social interactions taking place on digital platforms or negotiated through AI. Imagining a place and time where artists can gather, share a meal and long discussions into the night seems positively magical. I would invite artists I deeply respect and to whose work I intuitively respond. Three women, three men, three living, three no longer with us. All involved in a deep investigation of material and materiality in their work: Louise Bourgeois, Jack Whitten, Alberto Burri, Judy Pfaff, El Anatsui and Chiharu Shiota.
Imagine a late afternoon in the early summer. A large old pine table is set beneath several trees through which a gentle breeze wafts. Platters of crusty warm bread, cheeses, grilled vegetables, salads and fruit. Pitchers of wine, summer cocktails, water and iced tea. The pace is unforced and there is plenty of time to move around and engage in multiple conversations.
I envision a lively exchange ranging from material choice and meaning, specific inspirations and explorations, to interrogation of each other’s work and future intent. I would be a quiet participant, occasionally asking questions but for the most part, hungrily soaking in all that pours forth. Listening to and reveling in the rapid-fire debates, passions and intents, humor and laughter. while twilight deepens, fireflies emerge, candles are lit, and the conversations continue into the wee hours of the morning. If only it were so!
David S. Rubin: I have always had a fascination with 20th-century artists who attempted to visualize what the metaphysical zones of existence or consciousness might look like, whether viewed from a scientific or spiritual perspective. František Kupka, my favorite early modernist, is considered one of the pioneers of abstraction, yet the shapes in his compositions came from observations of such phenomena as the trajectory of a bouncing ball moving through space or light filtering through a cathedral window. Then there are spiritualists like Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky, whose so-called “non-objective” forms were actually representations of what they imagined the astral zones to be. With the advances in psychology by the 1930s, Roberto Matta Echaurren, along with other Surrealists, used automatism to suggest the form and contents of the collective unconscious.
I would gather together these artists to discuss the differences between empirical versus intuitive approaches to imagining life’s hidden matrix. Many of these artists believed in universal truths. Although I imagine that today there may be some skepticism, there is evidence to support the idea, such as the Fibonacci series that can be found in nature or the prevalence of serendipities in an individual person’s lifetime. So, I would thank Kupka, af Klint, Kandinsky, and Matta for opening my eyes and mind to exploring liminality and ask them to compare their approaches and debate their differing philosophical outlooks. Then, I would ask them about how all this relates to the perceptual aspects of viewing an artwork and whether or not they agree that their art can affect or even alter a viewer’s consciousness. I would then introduce them to the infinity rooms of Yayoi Kusama, which do indeed generate such moments, and ask for their reactions.
Karen Schifano: Robert Rauschenberg and Joan Jonas popped into my head as artists who would get my brain rewired and juiced up. They are not the usual suspects for me, but ones who I imagine might be good "spirit advisers" as I move forward in retirement toward a more full-time artist's life. I think that separate visits would be advisable since both were and are high-energy people with healthy egos. I would relish good talk about how to keep experimenting, how to keep art and life fresh, how to continue to try new things, even as we age (Jonas is still going strong at the age of 88), and the art world is still so much about marketplace and youth.
Both artists seem forever young to me, and I admire their bravery in stepping outside of the studio into dance spaces, live performance, installations that take up room. I remember seeing Rauschenberg's early paintings and objects, his Combines, and later his photo-based prints, and costumes and sets. I saw Jonas perform while I was working at the bookstore in the Whitney Museum and was astounded by her personal charisma and the charged force of her almost primeval sets and objects. Recently, I saw a performance at MoMA, questioning perception and the body (the Mirror Piece, I & II) and it was as fresh as when first conceived. In a way, both artists have a shamanistic energy that I deeply admire, although Rauschenberg might laugh at that after a couple of beers.
Sandra Filippucci: I don’t think I could have had a personal conversation with the brilliant Jennifer Bartlett unless it was strictly about her work. While she always described her process as similar to that of a nuclear physicist, her entire emotional life was in that work.
In 1975-76, she created and exhibited Rhapsody, a monumental installation of 987 steel plates (baked in enamel, silkscreened, and then painted). This was four seasons in one day. All drawn and painted—a hybrid lexicon of astrophysics, technology and mathematics yet still lyrically lovely.
In September of 1985, Bartlett was 44 years old when the Brooklyn Museum launched a major retrospective that traveled to several other venues. It still, to this day, is one of the most moving and pivotal experiences I have ever had with art. In Sea Wall, Bartlett combined oil painting and sculpture: three large canvases and more than a dozen sculptural elements, including houses, boats, stepping stones, and sea-wall components like a sea-shell chair and concrete breakers, stretching over 35 feet in length in its entirety.
Also in the room was her 1980–83 series In the Garden, which introduced me to the virtues of obsession. Obsession came early to Bartlett who, as a young girl, drew Cinderella hundreds of times over and over and over. This series was about a garden at a villa in Nice, France painted and drawn over 200 times from different perspectives.
If she were still with us, my question to Bartlett would be: You've balanced figuration and abstraction your entire career. In a 2011 Brooklyn Rail interview with Phong Bui, you said, "I always look for a way to drop the figurative element, but I haven’t succeeded yet.” Did you really want to drop the figurative because if you truly wanted to, you would have succeeded?
Laurie Fendrich: Truth be told, Leonardo da Vinci sits at the bottom of my list of favorite Old Master artists. That said, I get a thrill whenever I see his Mona Lisa (how small it always seems), The Virgin and Child with St. Anne (unfinished, but forever stunning), and the breathtaking Lady with an Ermine (in the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, where I made a special train trip from Warsaw to see it). I also love visiting and revisiting the red-and-black chalk drawing Head of the Virgin at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Despite making no more than 20 paintings, Leonardo earned his seat in the Pantheon of Painters by his invention of chiaroscuro and sfumato alone. Head of the Virgin, mentioned above, feels as if she exists in the round, rather than on a flat picture plane, because these “techniques” make her form seem indeterminate—which is what forms actually seem when we perceive them in nature. The question for painters is always, “Where, exactly, do things begin and end?” This indeterminacy—or call it ambiguity, or uncertainty—also appears in his invention of the “rough sketch.” Instead of drawing from templates, Leonardo created the organic, ever evolving enterprise of making lines that grope for the truth of what the artist sees. (I owe this insight to E.H. Gombrich’s brilliant essay, “Leonardo’s Method for Working out Compositions.”)
I’d be way too intimidated to actually try to converse with Leonardo, but if he’s listening, way up there in the Pantheon, it would be wonderful to hear from him. It’s now more than 500 years since he died, and I’d like to know if he still thinks “invenzione” (originality) is the painter’s main task.
About the contributors
Marina Capelletto, who was profiled for Vasari21 in 2018, lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where she makes metaphysically charged paintings and animations. Most recently, in 2025, Renée Riccardo organized a solo show of her work, “Wrap Around 23” at Arena Gallery at Suite 806 in New York City. In 2024 her work was on view at Palazzo Te in Mantua, Italy, organized by Lucio Pozzi and Annarosa Buttarelli, and titled “place - time - silence.” https://marinacappelletto.com/
Christine Aaron, a multimedia artist in Westchester, NY, contributed a “fantasy curation” called “Art and Materiality” to Vasari21 in 2018. She utilizes printmaking, wax, wood, metal and paper to create work investigating memory and the fragility of human connection. https://www.christineaaron.com/
David S. Rubin is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has published numerous exhibition catalogues and contributed to Art in America, Fabrik, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, and Visual Art Source. davidsrubin.com
Karen Schifano is a painter living and working in New York. She has exhibited widely in this country, Europe, Australia and Japan. She was elected to membership in the American Abstract Artists group in 2018. https://www.karenschifano.com/
Based in Connecticut, Sandra Filippucci was profiled for Vasari21 in 2019. She has been part of a group of New York artists working with technology since the mid-1980s and was the first artist to have a digitally based solo exhibition at The Museum of American Illustration in Manhattan. https://sandrafilippucci.com/
Laurie Fendrich is a painter, a professor emerita of fine arts at Hofstra University, and a frequent contributor to “Two Coats of Paint.” A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, she is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles. lauriefendrich.com
Diebenkorn. Perhaps just to give him a hug and thank him for my realizing I wanted to be a painter, not a printmaker. We could talk too but mostly the hug if he was open to that.
Cezanne. What he manages in depth and color amazes me. But this is a wonderful post, Ann, for its variety and interest.